my annual SOTU & word clouds rant

 Good to revisit: word clouds are the Fox News of linguistics (see here and here)

CompuPolitics or Wonkonomics?

Philip Resnik, computational linguist extraordinaire, has requested name candidates for a “new domain of activity” he described recently in a Language Log post.

But naming is not easy. It’s fun to mock bad names like Netflix’s dud Qwikster, but try coming up with a better one. Go on. I’ll wait …

Yeah, see. Not easy.

Money quote:
“…people are starting to suggest that volume and sentiment analysis on tweets … might produce useful information about people's viewpoints, or even predict the success of political campaigns. Indeed, it's been suggested that numbers derived from Twitter traffic might be better than polls, or at least better than pundits.”

So, what to call this pursuit? Resnik suggests CompuPolitics. But, I mean, really? It’s so 90s. Evoking CompuServe. It’s dead... stale... dry. The stench of moth-infested dust permeates my nostrils just reading it.

Resnik gave it a shot. He misfired, but I respect the effort. So what are we looking for in a name? An analogy could be drawn with Culturomics, the Google Ngrams inspired NLP endeavor. But let's be honest, that's a gawd-awful name reeking of middle-aged literary professors amazed that Eliza talks back. Rather, a better analogy might be Freakonomics, one of the best academic coinages of the last few decades (maybe ever). It has captured the spirit of its practitioners in a way that is immediately obvious to the lay person*.

But just what is Resnik trying to name? His Language Log post seems to be referencing a new field of academic pursuit, like behavioral economics or bioinformatics. But it’s also deeply embedded in industry practices which evoke terms like big data and text analytics Again, this suggests that Freakonomics is indeed an apt analogy as it refers not just to the style of analysis, but also a for-profit business model involving books, a NYT blog, and now a movie.

Let’s assume Resnik’s goal is to find a name for a business-savvy methodology. Let us recognize that many academic field names that we currently take as meaningful evocations of deep thinking actually have ridiculous names (the prevalence of Latin and Greek terms and blends alone should make us all giggle).

• Philosophy – blend of Greek philo- "loving" and sophia "knowledge” (‘love-knowledge’?? I mean, how stupid is that…)
• Biology – blend of Greek bios "life" and –logia “to speak” (what? ‘life speaks’? huh? ‘the talking life’? dumb dumb dumb)
• English – I mean, frik, really? Is this a real academic department? Next, you’ll tell me there’s a real Department of French and Romance Philology.

To coin a new term, we want some understanding of the themes we want the new term to evoke. Here’s a stab at what I think Resnik is looking for:

Technical Themes:

1. Computational (oooh, “science”)
2. Political (ugh, windbags)
3. New (oooh, shiny)
4. Search/discovery (ya mean like the googles?)

Emotional Themes:

1. Pulse of opinion (I care about what other people care about)
2. Gravitas (really smart people care about this)
3. Better than polls or pundits (I hate them anyway, now I know why)
4. Value (who doesn’t love a bargain)
5. Honesty (fake tweets and Twitter-bots are not my friends)

Big Picture Themes:

1. Rising above the noise (Needle? Check. Haystack? Check.)
2. Making a difference (like Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me)
3. Finding the truth (“the truth is out there”)
4. This is the future, and it’s good (like Justin Beiber?)

Now, to find a single word or phrase that captures all of that at once… hmmmm. Here's a half hearted attempt:

Name Candidates

Literal (typically the most clunky, clumsy, and goofy, worth avoiding)

• CompuPolitics – blend of computer and politics
• SentiMent – riff on one word sentiment
• Sentics – blend of sentiment and politics
• Poliments – blend of politics and sentiment
• PoliTude – blend of politics and attitude
• Crowditude – blend of crowd and attitude
• PoliInformatics – blend of politics and informatics ala bioinformatics

Associative

• Flutter – ala “Twitter”, this evokes temporary changes in sentiment captured by the technology.
• CanaryStats – evokes canary in coal mine analogy
• Wonkonomics - Fun, professional, evokes both George Stephanopoulos and Willy Wonka in the same breath

Homage

• Freakoment - blend of Freakonomics and sentiment (I mean, fuck it, those guys are making bank, right?)
• Groupthink – a little creepy, but ya know, Orwell knew language…

Clearly, I favor the awesomely evocative Wonkonomics. But you be the judge...

* Let us put aside the inevitable debate over whether or not Freakonomics is good science. It’s a great name.

the incoherent accents of Hugo

Saw Hugo. It's more for big kids than little ones, imho. I enjoyed it and found its retro-whimsy entertaining, but the 3D is frustrating for someone who wears prescription glasses. It has a talented cast of veteran British actors who don't get nearly enough screen time (Kingsley may get a best supporting actor nod come Oscar time). Also, I'm an unabashed Chloë Moretz fan, and she is every bit as good in this film as I expected. She is one of the best teen actors in history and she keeps getting better.  She has the facial expressiveness of Brando, and I don't say that lightly. Unfortunately, the film rests on the performance of its lead, Asa Butterfield, who is, sorry to say, flat and unconvincing as the orphan genius tinkerer Hugo. Partly this is because his dialogue is awful and clunky. No one talks that way, especially not a scared orphan. He also lack the facial expressiveness of Moretz but is in constant juxtaposition with her, so he pales even the greater in comparison.

For a little linguistic aside (since this is The Lousy Linguist, not The Lousy Film Critic), the film is set in Paris, but everyone has an English accent, including the Atlanta born American actress Moretz. Rumor has it she auditioned for Scorsese with the accent and he didn't know she was American (though I find this hard to believe since she has been a well known actress for several years now).

Moretz did an acceptable job affecting the British accent, as far as I could tell, though I'm not that good at spotting phonies unless they're really bad. I did detect the occasional break, though. More to the point, why is everyone speaking with a British accent in Paris!!!

Accents in movies are a storyteller's way to set the mood, so to speak. I find it to be one of the most incoherent, yet successful, tricks in the movie biz. When Hollywood makes a movie about WW2, the Nazi's all have German accents.

But here's the linguistically incoherent part. Back then, during WW2, when Nazis spoke to each other ... they didn't have accents! Not to each others' ears. When French people speak to each other in French, they don't sound foreign to each other. They sound like native speakers. Yet, Hollywood (and other film markets too, I'm sure) has decided that "sounding foreign" sets the mood for a film set in a foreign land.  Even more incoherent is when film makers think they are being more "authentic" by having actors speak in foreign accents, when, linguistically speaking, this is about as INauthentic as you can get. When native speakers of any language speak to each other, they don't sound foreign. Yet, when audiences watch films set in foreign lands, the key to making the audience feel the sense of authenticity, is to make the actors sound foreign. Cognitive dissonance anyone?

Perry's tip-of-the-tongue flubb

Much virtual ink is being spilled/spilt about US Presidential candidate Rick Perry's tip-of-the-tongue gaff at Wednesday night's GOP debate. His inability to remember a third government department he would cut is being decried as the ultimate end of his candidacy. This may be the case, I honestly don't know. But I think the linguists of the world should point out that tip-of-the-tongue speech errors are universal and say nothing about a person's intelligence or even their preparedness. They are entirely a function of neuro-biological processes which we all encounter. Luckily one (and as far as I can tell right now, only one) journalist bothered to follow up on The Science Behind Rick Perry’s Debate Brain Freeze. Money quote:

When the brain juggles a reasonable quantity of information and tries to make sense of it—as Perry was presumably trying to do as he channeled what he knew, and began to answer CNBC moderator Maria Bartiromo’s question—activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead, increases: this is the circuitry that handles decision making and emotional control.


But as you attempt to tap into more and more information, as Perry was presumably trying to do (imagine him desperately going down the list of cabinet departments and other federal agencies trying to come up with the third one on his hit list), activity in the dorsolateral PFC drops like a stone. It’s as if a circuit breaker pops as a result of “cognitive and information overload,” Angelika Dimoka of Temple University told me for a recent story.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Calling all Brits stuck in the colonies...

The Economist's Johnson blog wants Brits living in the US to take a dialect survey.

One of the set-piece conversations that Britons living in America have with each other, besides how cold it is, how hot it is, or how interesting it is that people here don't talk about the weather all the time, is about which British words or pronunciations they have shed in favour of their American equivalents...If you're a Brit living in the United States, please take a minute (no longer) to fill out this web form. Just put in how long you've lived in the United States, and mark which Americanisms you use. I'll post the results in a few days..

The survey, in case you missed it, is here.

So, you want a real job?

My guest post about the job market for linguistics outside academia at Zoltan Varju's blog is available here.

no one is scared of Johnny Depp (a film review)

I just saw The Rum Diary starring Johnny Depp. I enjoyed this film a lot. It is well paced, fun, beautiful, caustic, and funny ...yet... Depp just never seemed right as Thompson (thinly veiled as Paul Kemp, Puerto Rico journalist in the early 1960s).

Before critiquing Depp, let me run through a few non-Depp related points:

I can recommend this film without hesitation as unquestionably worth your time and money. Go see this film. This film is better than 95% of the films that have come out in the last 20 years. I'm not joking, Go see this film.

Brilliant dialogue: Kudos to writer/direct Bruce Robinson for allowing Thompson's witty yet brutally incisive social critiques to highlight the dialogue. This is a beautifully rendered script. It was an honor to listen to characters say interesting things again after decades of trite piffle littering our movie screens. This is the best screenplay since 2009's An Education.

Giovanni Ribisi is fantastic as the weird, drunk, Hitler-loving Moburg. His performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Amber Heard is visually stunning, but she is rarely given more than 6 words to say at a time (same is true for her performance in Pineapple Express). With so few lines, it's not clear if she is a bad actor or if no one will give her the chance to act. I couldn't help but be reminded of Scarlett Johansson, who is truly beautiful, but is an utterly cringe-worthy actor (only Sofia Coppola has managed to wring a competent performance out of her).

That said...

I am a Johnny Depp fan. I like most of his films. I have known Depp to be a Thompson devotee for some time, but only this week learned he actually lived with Thompson for a couple years in the early 1990s (if I read this correctly).

But! Depp has something of the vaudevillian in him. A knowing performer, deft at character, but always with a nod to the audience about the façade, the game, a wink to their suspension of disbelief. Enjoy the show folks, glad you could spare some time for my little charade. It is precisely this man-behind-the-curtain nod that troubled me throughout the film. I had a similar response to Depp's turn as Thompson in the 1998 film, but I couldn't quite put it to words.

I grew up in a family of Hunter Thompson fans. My three older brothers lived Thompson-esque lives (complete with hilarious, madcap drug addled stories, but also to horrible ends in one case). I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I was 12 and loved it. I read everything Thompson I could find. My dad once found about 30 old Rolling Stone magazines at a yard sell for like $2 and bought the lot and they were filled with Thompson articles. I read them all. I read Hell Angels, The Great Shark Hunt. Hell, I even read The Curse of Lono. Like all Thompson fans, I knew of the existence of The Rum Diary, his first novel written in the 1960s but not published until the late 1990s, and I yearned for the chance to read the unpublished manuscript. When it finally did get published, I jumped at it. Some of you line up for Harry Potter movies, I lined up for The Rum Diaries.

So, I respect Johnny Depp's talent and sincerity and I defer to the fact that he actually knew the man quite well (and I didn't); nonetheless, Hunter S. Thompson played a remarkably important role in my formative years and I feel that entitles me to a certain level of critique (I could be wrong about that...entitlements are typically bullshit ... but this is my bullshit).

And my critique is this: Johnny Depp lacks authenticity. I cannot buy him as Thompson. At least, I cannot buy him as the embodiment of my conception of Thompson. Depp is fun, quirky, smarmy, but always superficial. Thompson is dangerously loose, and frighteningly deep. Depp is never dangerous because his knowing smirk lets us know it's just a game. Thompson never lets us off the hook this way. You may question the truth of Thompson's claims secretly, in your heart, but Thompson never lets you question him to his face, you wouldn't dare. You'd be too scared. But no one is scared of Johnny Depp. He's a kid playing dress up.

This is not a losing battle. Bill Murray's 1980 performance as Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam is dead on. Murray nails Thompson's duality of hilarious and dangerous, fun and scary, fake and real. Johnny Depp nails the hilarious, fun, fake parts, but fails at the dangerous, scary, real parts. No duality. Perhaps my early, formative exposure to that 1980 film has poisoned me to all others. Maybe.

Regardless, I end with my opening plea: Go see this film. You will be happy you did.

Stanford professors and grammatical illusions

I started reading The Origins of Political Order by Stanford professor Francis Fukuyama when I stumbled across this sentence:

• But it is clear that the political job of finding the right regulatory mechanisms to tame capitalism's volatility have not yet been found.

I read it a second time. Then a third. It just didn't seem right. The verb "have" is wrong, right? It should be "has", I think. But it was difficult to see why until I broke the sentence down to its essential elements. The linguistic dependencies are obscured by multiple embedded PPs, in this case, making it difficult to get the agreement right.

Distilling a complex sentence down to its essential elements is a technique I taught to students for years because it helps us see what the sentence "means" in a basic sense, and all we need is our intuition. No linguistic theory or technical terms are required. One way to do begin is to simply replace noun phrases with variables like X and Y:

• But it is clear that the X of finding the right Y to tame Z have not yet been found.

Already we see that "have" sounds more clearly wrong. Next we can delete the introductory phrase "But..."

• The X of finding the right Y to tame Z have not yet been found.

Now we have distilled the sentence to its basic elements. To figure out why "have" sounds wrong, we can delete all prepositional phrases, as they are not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence:

• The X have not yet been found.

Finally, we need only put the original X phrase back in:

• The political job have not yet been found.

Using just our intuition, two things should be obvious:

1. The subject "political job" is singular and requires the verb to be "has" (syntax).
2. It is odd to speak about finding a political job (when it clearly does not mean job in the sense of getting paid to do something). Rather, this is referring to political will (semantics).

A little analysis of the original and we can guess that Fukuyama was probably trying to construct a linguistic dependency between "have" and "regulatory mechanisms." But this dependency is ungrammatical in the strict sense that "regulatory mechanisms" is not the subject of the sentence. Yet the sentence is not obviously ungrammatical (like "Bob feet have."). I taught 18 year old public school freshmen about this, but we can see that this kind of thing gets the best of even highly educated, accomplished Stanford professors. It is a function of how our brains construct and parse sentences.

This sentence presents what Colin Phillips has called a grammatical illusion. He explains them thusly:

Research on the online implementation of grammatical constraints reveals a strikingly uneven profile. The parser shows impressive accuracy in the application of some rather complex constraints, but makes many errors in the implementation of some relatively simple constraints.

His plenary talk at LSA 2010 provided a variety of examples (many involving "have", curiously enough). Here's a pre-print PDF of his work on the topic:

Grammatical illusions and selective fallibility in real-time language comprehension. Colin Phillips, Matt Wagers, & Ellen Lau. 26pp. June 2009. To appear in Language and Linguistics Compass.

"the definition of “metaphoricity” is problematic in itself"

One of the metaphor recognition papers I read this week had an interesting finding wrt inter-annotator agreement and metaphor: The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A Corpus-based Analysis (Babarczy et a., LREC 2010 Workshop).

The purpose of the paper was to run a sort-of bake-off between three methods of creating source/target word lists (to be used by selection preference metaphor recognition system): Three different methods of compiling the word lists were tested: a) word association experiment, b) dictionary of synonyms, and c) reference corpus.

Ultimately they found that their corpus based method was most successful as measured by recall/precision, but there was a more striking result rather buried in the paper that I feel deserves more analysis. They created a gold standard by hand-tagging a 30,000 word "baseline" corpus. Here's what they found:

At the first attempt, inter-annotator agreement was only 17%. After refining the annotation instructions, we made a second attempt, which resulted in an agreement level of 48%, which is still a strikingly low value. These results indicate that the definition of “metaphoricity” is problematic in itself [emphasis added].

They reported three general sources of inter-annotator DISagreement:

• Direct vs. Indirect Reference: For example, in the case of the conceptual metaphors ANGER IS HEAT or CONFLICT IS FIRE, the source domain should be an expression referring to a sort of “heated thing”. However, in some cases, one or the other annotator included words indirectly suggesting the presence of heat, such as kiolt ('extinguish'), kihől ( 'get cold') etc.

• Lexical Ambiguity: For example, the expression eljutottam a mai napig ('I've gotten to this day') may or may not represent a CHANGE IS MOTION metaphor depending on whether the Hungarian verb jut (literally: get somewhere, reach a place by moving the entire body) is taken only to denote physical movement or to be ambiguous.

• Discrepancies in Classification: ...it is difficult to make an informed decision on whether the following example contains a CHANGE IS MOTION or a PROGRESS IS MOTION FORWARD metaphor, neither of which appear to be an intuitively correct choice: a járvány végigsöpört szülıvárosukon ('the epidemic swept through their hometown').

Of the four or five articles I've reviewed on automatic metaphor identification, this is the only one which reported on the results of human-tagging a corpus for metaphor. This strikes me as the sort of thing that should be a first step for anyone seriously interested in this program (certainly anyone interested in the IARPA Metaphor Program).I don't doubt that others have done this, but it seems to be under-reported, suggesting it is not be treated as a core part of the problem.

I've complained in my previous posts that there is an overly restricted definition of metaphor underlying contemporary approaches to auto identification, but even within a highly restricted definition like those used by Babarczy et al. and others, there appears to be problems at the heart of identification for humans. So what exactly is being identified?


Anna Babarczy, Ildikó Bencze M., István Fekete, & Eszter Simon (2010). The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A Corpus-Based Analysis LREC 2010 Workshop. Proceedings

more on auto metaphor recognition methods

A quick follow-up to my previous post on automatic metaphor recognition wrt the IARPA Metaphor Program. The paper Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns by Tang et al. challenges the dominant selectional preferences method by substituing their own Semantic Relations Patterns. They point out the problems with Selection Preferences (unfortunately I don't think they solved the problems with their own method, more on that in a bit).

Again I'll give the Ling 101, computational linguistics for dummies version (as I understand it ...): Selection Preferences assumes that words frequently co-occur with other words that are literally associated with the same semantic domain. For example,

1. That ship has sailed the mighty ocean.
2. That boat has sailed across lake Erie.
3. That captain has sailed many seas.

In these three sentences, the verb sailed occurs with three different subjects (ship, boat, captain) and three different objects (ocean, lake, seas), but all of them evoke the SAILING domain. So a computer could use this info to create a model of the verb sail that would match up the semantics of its expected subjects and objects, then compare them to a new sentence. If the computer encountered the new sentence

    4. That student sailed through final exams.

It could automatically use the model created from sentences 1-3 above to recognize that the verb sailed occurs with a subject and object not from the SAILING domain, but rather from the STUDENT domain. Then it could use a metaphor mapping component to recognize that HUMANS as MACHINES is an acceptable mapping and thus recognize that #4 might be coherent under a metaphorical interpretation.

Tang et al. rightly point out that matching frequency-based selectional preferences is not the same thing as literal meaning. First, they note that some times, a metaphorical pairing is actually MORE FREQUENT than a litertal pairing. They use some Chinese examples, but I think the English translation makes the point. Take the following two uses of close:

• The plane is close to the tower.
• Opinion are close.

In their corpus, Chinese uses like 'opinions are close' were more frequent, even though this is a non-literal use of close. Frequency would lead the Selectional Preference method to believe that the opinions-type use is literal simply because it is more frequent. This outcome is predicted by Lakoff & Johnson, btw, because one of the core tenants of their seminal work on metaphors was that metaphors are NOT special uses of language, but rather quite common and normal.

Tang et al.'s solution is a new method they call Semantic Relation Patterns. Their explanation is brief and highly technical, making it a slog to get through, but it hinges on incorporating an existing semantic relations knowledge base, HowNet, and adding a probabalistic model. Note, I had trouble getting the HowNet website to load, but here is a PDF explanation.

How Net is an on-line common-sense knowledge base unveiling inter-conceptual relations and inter-attribute relations of concepts as connoting in Chinese and English bilingual lexicons.

In my quick read the two methods differed only minimally in the crucial ways (namely, they are both lexalist and local). Semantic Relation patterns are still based on lexical semantics and still derived entirely locally. I don't see how SRP would handle this metaphor from my earlier post any better than SP:

Imagine a situation in a biology class where two students, Alger and Miriam, were originally going to be partners for a lab assignment. Then they got into an argument. A third student, Annette, asks Miriam:

• Annette: Are you still going to be lab partners with Alger?
• Miriam: No. That ship has sailed.

In this scenario, the sentence "That ship has sailed" is entirely coherent and literal from a selectional preferences perspective (i.e., ships really do sail). Yet it is clearly being used metaphorically (there is literally no ship). Here, the metaphor is only detectable if we link two sentences together via co-reference. The phrase "the ship" does not co-refer to a real ship in the discourse. Rather, it refers to the possible event of be-lab-partners-with-Alger. Unless we can link phrases between sentences and between types (i.e., allowing an NP to co-refer to an event), then we are not going to get a computer to recognize these types of metaphors (which I suspect are quite common).

I appreciate Tang et al.'s critique of the SP method and their attempt to get beyond it, but I think their methodology fails to make the critical improvements to automatic metaphor recognition that will be crucial to creating a full scale tool that handles real world metaphor.



Xuri Tang, Weiguang Qu, Xiaohe Chen, & Shiwen Yu (2010). Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns International Conference on Asian Language Processing

the big picture: automatic metaphor identification

The recently popularized IARPA Metaphor Program piqued my curiosity, so I've been reviewing a variety of articles on contemporary approaches to automatic metaphor identification. I've read three articles so far and one thing is somewhat dissapointing: they all severely restrict the notion of metaphor to mean local metaphors within single sentences.

They all pay considerable lip service to Lakoff & Johnson's seminal 1980 work Metaphors We Live By, taking as gospel the notion that metaphor is defined as a mapping from one conceptual domain to another. But their examples are all of a limited type. Here are three representative examples from the papers I've been reading:

• Achilles was a lion. (Babarczy et al.)
• The sky is sad. (Tang et al.)
• I attacked his arguments (Baumer)

What struck me is the methods used to identify metaphor are remarkably lexalist. The dominant strategy is Selectional Preferences whereby a list of source and target conceptual domains is created. Then from each, a list of words typically associated with that domain is culled from corpora or intuition or dictionaries. Then, each word is given a set of selectional preferences which constrain what kinds of subjects or predicates it typically occurs with.

Here is my Ling 101 version of this methodology: If I understand correctly (and I may not), for Tang et al.'s example "The sky is sad", we would have a concept like THE ENVIRONMENT IS HUMAN. We would have a list of words typically associated with the environment (e.g., "sky") and a list of words typically associated with being human (for example "sad"). A computer could then recognize the following:

1. The subject (the sky) is associated with the environment.
2. The predicate (sad) is associated with humans.
3. This subject (the sky) is not typical for this predicate (sad).
4. This sentence is incoherent on first analysis.
5. The concept THE ENVIRONMENT IS HUMAN links these non-typical phrases coherently.
6. This sentence is only coherent using conceptual mapping, therefore it is probably metaphorical.

This is a gross oversimplification, but I think it gets the big picture about right.

At first blush, I'm impressed with the simplicity and elegance of this solution. However, it seems to me that much metaphorical language is not local like this (local here = within a single sentence). For example, imagine a situation in a biology class where two students, Alger and Miriam, were originally going to be partners for a lab assignment. Then they got into an argument. A third student, Annette, asks Miriam:

• Annette: Are you still going to be lab partners with Alger?
• Miriam: No. That ship has sailed.

In this scenario, the sentence "That ship has sailed" is entirely coherent from a selectional preferences perspective (i.e., ships really do sail). Yet it is clearly being used metaphorically (there is literally no ship). Here, the metaphor is only detectable if we link two sentences together via co-reference. The phrase "the ship" does not co-refer to a real ship in the discourse. Rather, it refers to the possible event of be-lab-partners-with-Alger. Unless we can link phrases between sentences and between types (i.e., allowing an NP to co-refer to an event), then we are not going to get a computer to recognize these types of metaphors (which I suspect are quite common).



Xuri Tang, Weiguang Qu, Xiaohe Chen, & Shiwen Yu (2010). Automatic Metaphor Recognition Based on Semantic Relation Patterns International Conference on Asian Language Processing


Other citations:
The Automatic Identification of Conceptual Metaphors in Hungarian Texts: A
Corpus-Based Analysis. Anna Babarczy, Ildikó Bencze M.1, István Fekete1, Eszter Simon1

Computational Metaphor Identification to Foster Critical Thinking and Creativity. ERIC BAUMER (dissertation). 2009.

the largest whorfian study EVER! (and why it matters)

Let me take the ball Mark Liberman threw on Monday and run with it a bit. Liberman posted a thorough discussion of Fausey and Broditsky's neo-Whorfian English and Spanish speakers remember causal agents differently. Specifically, he invited readers to carefully examine the methodology of the experiments themselves, and not just focus on the conclusions. It turns out that a few years ago another set of neo-Whorfians, Jürgen Bohnemeyer and company, published a paper that addressed similar methodological concerns:

Ways to go: Methodological considerations in Whorfian studies on motion events. (With S. Eisenbeiss and B. Narasimhan) Colchester: University of Essex, Department of Language and Linguistics (Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 50: 1-19). 2006.

This paper addressed experiments involving motion events like rolling and falling whereas Fausey and Broditsky's work addressed agentivity like breaking and popping, but there's enough overlap to warrant some comparison, particularly since the Bohnemeyer et al. paper specifically addresses methodology wrt Whorfian experiments.

But before I get into the details, let me state clearly why I think this is important. In other posts, I have dismissed popular lingo-topics like language evolution as outside the mainstream of linguistics because they don't bear directly on what I consider to be the center of the linguistics universe: How the brain does language. But linguistic relativity (aka, The Whorfian hypothesis) is one of the great questions of linguistics and cognitive science precisely because it bears directly on the question of how the brain does language. And we're only just now developing the proper tools and methodologies to study the question with scientific rigor. It may turn out that language does not affect other cognitive processes or the effect is minor. I don't care. I just want to know one way or the other. And it's work like Bohnemeyer's and Broditsky's that will lead us to knowing, eventually.

Now the fun stuff.

Through the Language Glass (Part 2) [reposted]

This is part 2 of my review of Guy Deutscher's new book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. This covers The Language Lens (129-249). Part 1 is here. This review will cover the scientific evidence that Deutscher reviews suggesting that language affects thought, and will end with a shocking proposal.

To sum up my review of part one: meh. Okay, we've established that culture can influence language. This is a lot less controversial than Deutscher makes it seem and he spent a large amount of text defending that position. Okay, whatever, time to move on. In part 2 he again begins with historical review explaining why he thinks Whorf was a con man, but also why he thinks the core insights of early linguist relativity deserve closer, honest investigation. He complains that based his Hopi claims on just one lonely informant (p142). We'll see later that Deutscher himself falls for the same trap. He replaces Whorf with the Boas-Jakobson principle that languages differ in what they must convey, not what they may convey” (151). I respect Deutscher for making this a central theme in his book because I think he's right. To parrot his own recitation of Humbolt: any thought can be expressed in any language. It is what our native language forces us to foreground that makes linguistic relativity an interesting topic.

Deutscher spends most of the second part of the book reviewing three areas of language that have provided evidence that language affects thought: spatial coordinates, grammatical gender, and color terms (familiar from part 1). The general point I want to make about his evidence is that it is far weaker than he maintains. But is is interesting. A brief set of reactions:

Spatial Coordinates -- everything is embodied
Most of his argumentation about the affect of spacial coordinate terms on thought stems from Levinson's evidence from speakers of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr which is famous for giving us the word “kangaroo.” Speakers of GY do not generally use ego-centric terms like "right" and "left" but rather use cardinal direction terms like "east" and "west." As a result, Deutscher claims, they remember information about situations differently than speakers of English. They have, so the argument goes, a perfect pitch for direction and they are always attuned to where north is. Deutscher's claim is that only the linguistic repetition of such terms can possibly account for this. Hence, their language affects what they pay attention to and what they remember, hence language affects thought.

I've never found this line of research all that convincing regarding linguistic relativity and Deutscher does not really add much to the debate. Like Deutscher's complaint above regarding Whorf's one lonely Hopi speaker, it turns out there are not many native speakers of Guugu Yimithirr left and haven't been for a while. These experiments on directional language involve very few speakers, and most of them have both cardinal direction and ego-centric direction in their dialect. If we're going to complain about Whorf's restricted subject pool, we must complain about Levinson's too.

But more to the point, I believe all direction terms are ultimately ego-centric insofar as they are embodied. The terms "north" and "south" are not magically universal. They are based on a human being's body and orientation (i.e., ego-centric). Don't believe me, ask yourself, what does "north" mean in space? What does "north" mean to an amoeba? Mostly what Deutscher does in his discussions of direction terms is reiterate the point he belabored in Part 1: culture affects language. Yeah, we got that already.

The rise of similarity judgments
That is until he discusses the table experiments. These experiments show subjects tables with objects on them and ask them to arrange them in accordance with a target. Basically, they ask for similarity judgement. How can you make this table arrangement similar to the previous table. This methodological paradigm has become prominent in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, especially studies testing linguistic relativity. In fact, all of the studies Deutscher discusses are similarity judgment studies of one sort or another. The point is that I show you one target thing, then two test things and ask, which test is MORE SIMILAR to the target than the other? Ultimately Deutscher himself problematizes spatial coordinate terms so much, they fall flat and remain unconvincing as a base of evidence for linguistic relativity.

Grammatical Gender
Most languages have terms for classifying things. Some languages have more elaborate classifier systems than others. In German, the term for the fork is die Gabel, marked by feminine die. Ultimately, most languages with elaborate classifiers have systems that can be described as incoherent in so far as most things given one classification have no inherent properties that signify that classification (there is nothing inherently feminine about a fork). However, Deutscher provides evidence that speakers of languages with grammatical gender will evoke properties of things in keeping with their gender classifier, suggesting that the classifier is causing them to imagine a fork would speak with a female voice, for example. But these experiments mainly test vague associations of imagination, not linguistic causality, as Deutscher admits.

Color Terms
It is not until chapter 9 Russian Blues that Deutscher really delivers the goods. It is this chapter which provides the most interesting evidence for the effect of language on thought. Pity it is only about 15 pages of the book. The whole book should have been more like this. The facts he discusses involve the basic point that the brain sees what it wants to see. It turns out our perception of color has little to do with any objective feature of the thing we're looking at (he explains this fact brilliantly in the Appendix which I highly recommend, and frankly, should have been the first chapter, not relegated to the attic of an appendix). The point is that our brains change the input. As our eyes take in objective photons, our brain photoshops the input (a great analogy from Deutscher which really brings the point home).

The experimental results Deutscher discusses involve more similarity judgements, albeit with a twist. Instead of relying solely on the similarity judgments, researchers studied the more objective reaction time. They showed people different color patches and asked them to judge the sameness. Despite the various and clever variations on this theme, they all relied on subjective judgements of similarity. And this is where they fail to extricate themselves from the problem of strategizing.

Unfortunately they all share the critical flaw that making a similarity judgment is a logical reason act and may be mitigated by strategizing. Deutscher discusses this fact, but doesn't realize that none of the fixes work. A similarity judgment is always a logical process susceptible to the effects of strategizing. This will be a major issue in my Shocking Proposal at the end. You see, regardless of how clever the test, as long as you are basically asking a subject to make a similarity judgment, you are asking them to reason about the task. So your results will be tinged by the strategizing of human subjects as they logically try to game the system. This is well known in psycholinguistics and difficult to avoid. So how do you objectively test what colors a person considers blue?

A Shocking Proposal
The paradigm already exists. How can you objectively prove that English speakers really do consider aspirated /kh/ and unaspirated /k/ both the same phoneme? You condition them to fear aspirated /kh/ by shocking them every time they hear it (measuring their galvanic skin response). Once they are conditioned, you then play them unaspirated /k/ (with no shock) and check to see if you get the same GSR spike (in anticipation).

Okay, now apply this to color terms. Condition subjects to fear center of the category blue, then show them gradations. What causes the GSR spike? That's what they consider blue. now do that with speakers of 40 different languages.

If the hippies on the human subjects review board let you do it, there's your dissertation.


Guy Deutscher (2010). Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Metropolitan Books

Super 8: more homework than movie

A rare non-linguistics post: Saw Super 8. Critics are spot on: it's a movie that shows how to construct a coherent narrative like they used to make. It is simple, straight forward. It makes contemporary movies like Transformers, Thor, and Pirates seem amateurish and sad. It's like a tutorial in narrative film-making.

Unfortunately, it's like a tutorial in narrative film-making ... more like homework than enjoyment. I felt like I should be taking notes. Like there'd be a quiz at the end.

One reason this is so is simple modern history. 30 years ago, good narrative films were strictly the domain of Hollywood. TV was the domain of kitsch and schmaltz. But since the 1990s, TV (largely due to HBO, and more recently Showtime, TNT, AMC...) has taken over the mantel of prime story teller. We know from good narratives. We know from good structure. We know from good plot. We know from good formula (we loved Law and Order for 20 years, after all).

So now, in 2011, the ET/Goonies routine rings a bit hollow. Like movie-plot-by-the-book; paint-by-numbers film making. Sure, it's more coherent than Thor (a truly gawdawful film), but Breaking Bad and Mad Men are still way better, and they don't cost me $11 and a special trip. Don't even get me started on how much better the revived Doctor Who is than this Hollywood trash.

simple english wikipedia

I didn't know this existed until it was referenced briefly in an unrelated article. Simple English Wikipedia:

This is the front page of the Simple English Wikipedia. Wikipedias are places where people work together to write encyclopedias in different languages. We use Simple English words and grammar here. The Simple English Wikipedia is for everyone! That includes children and adults who are learning English.

Great idea! I perused some of the articles relating to linguistics, language, and grammar. Not bad. Under Grammar, they write:

When we speak, we use the native-person's grammar, or as near as we can. When we write, we try to write with correct usage grammar. So, speaking and writing a language each have their own style.

While one may want to quibble a little with this (I don't quite understand the "as near as we can" hedge), it's actually a nice way to explain the difference between speaking and writing to, say, a 10 year old.