Adam's Tongue (pt 3)

(classic depiction of Saussure's arbitrariness of the sign claim)

This is the second in a series of posts detailing my notes and thoughts about the book Adam's Tongue as I prepare to lead a book discussion meeting July 6, 2009 in the DC metro area (see my first post here and second here).

Ch 3 - Thinking Like Engineers

I've spent the last 5 years working in natural language processing and with engineers and I agree that there is something very valuable for a linguist to "think like an engineer" so I was curious from the start about this chapter, but I was also weary because the Chomskyan syntacticians also "think like engineers" and I believe they have led linguistics down a garden path of false starts and flawed theories for 40 years. So I read on cautiously.

• DB notes that he came into linguistics via pidgins and creoles and they bear on his thinking about language evolution. But does this bias him too, like the man who has a hammer and sees everything as a nail? We shall see.

• DB says there's no syntax when we try to speak with people who don't share our language (p 39) because we don't know enough of the language, the foreign words just pop out as we grope for them. Now, I certainly defer to DB's far greater expertise of pidgin & creole formation, but this thought experiment of his does not jive with my own experiences. Like many travelers, I've had this exact experience in places like Guangzhou China and Prague but I don't think the foreign words "just popped out" quite as randomly as he suggests. I'm tending to side with Slobin here.

• He claims that protowords must not have had any internal morphological structure (41) because early language users would have had no rules defining that structure. On it's face, this makes sense, nonetheless this begs the question: which came first, the word or the morphology? Is it not plausible that some neurologically based process for seeking internal structure to sounds developed prior to the advent or words? I just don't know.

• The boom vocalization of the Campbell's monkey occurs 30 seconds before the alarm (42). My first reaction: wow! this is stretching the limits of transitional probabilities, isn't it? Can we plausibly claim that an association between sounds 30 seconds apart is neurologically feasible?
  

• DB claims these booms are not modifiers (p42) because the boom "cancels out" the alarm. I'd have to review the literature on these boom carefully, but my first reaction is: does it really cancel the alarm? If I understand the context, it simply means "not immediate threat (but still a threat)". That's not a cancellation. It's more like epistemic modality: "there MIGHT be danger."
  

• Page 44 -- The gavagai problem restated.

• Confused: I'm confused by DB's claim on page 45 that "words combine as separate units -- they never blend. They're atoms, not mudballs." I'm not sure what he means. Blending and combining are different, in that blending suggests some elements of both previous words/calls are preserved in the new word/call. This happens all the time in contemporary linguistic change (classic example: motel blends motor + hotel, persevering bits of each's morphology as well as semantic blending). But I suspect DB is not referencing that. So what is he referencing?

• He makes a nice distinction between ACSs and Language: ACSs are primarily for manipulation of behavior while language is primarily for information sharing. I have no clue if this is really true, but if yes, it's a good point (p 47).
  

• He writes "language units are symbolic because they're designed to convey information." A nice follow-up point on the difference point above, but it begs the question: what is "information"? Any answer which supports DB would have to couch a definition in abstraction, right? E.g., Information is a conceptualization that is independent from direct reference.

• DB makes a bold claim on page 52 that strikes at the heart of post-Saussurean linguistics: displacement is a more important factor to language evolution than arbitrariness. But it's worth noting that both are functions of abstraction, so perhaps this is just another version of his previous point that the jump to abstract thought is the key.

On to chapter 3 -- Singing Apes....

Adam's Tongue (pt 2)

This is the second in a series of posts detailing my notes and thoughts about the book Adam's Tongue as I prepare to lead a book discussion meeting July 6, 2009 in the DC metro area (see my first post here).

Ch 1 - The size of the problem

• This chapter is designed to walk through what's wrong with other theories of language evolution.

• The basic point of the chapter seems to be this: no animal communication system (ACS) allows itself to refer to things distant in time and space, therefore they are not likely the precursors of language. Everyone who has taken or taught a Language Files course knows these two criteria as Hockett's two communication features unique to human language (Bickerton get's to Hockett in due course).
  

• On the very first page of this chapter, I noted, "Is there a gavagai problem here?" By which I meant, how can we know what one of these ACS references really refers to? Bickerton's index lists nothing for either "Quine" or "gavagai," though he skirts this issue repeated for the next few chapters (and possibly the whole book). This dilemma become particularly critical in chapter 4 Chatting Apes, but I'll come to that later.

As a background, here's a passage from Wikipedia's Indeterminacy of translation page describing Quine's famous example:

Consider Quine's example of the word "gavagai" uttered by a native upon seeing a rabbit[1]. The linguist could do what seems natural and translate this as "Lo, a rabbit." But other translations would be compatible with all the evidence he has: "Lo, food"; "Let's go hunting"; "There will be a storm tonight" (these natives may be superstitious); "Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage"; "Lo, an undetached rabbit-part." Some of these might become less likely – that is, become more unwieldy hypotheses – in the light of subsequent observation. Others can only be ruled out by querying the natives: An affirmative answer to "Is this the same gavagai as that earlier one?" will rule out "momentary rabbit stage," and so forth. But these questions can only be asked once the linguist has mastered much of the natives' grammar and abstract vocabulary; that in turn can only be done on the basis of hypotheses derived from simpler, observation-connected bits of language; and those sentences, on their own, admit of multiple interpretations, as we have seen.

• No gradual move from ACS to human language (17): Since evolution is gradual and slow, there would have to be a "missing link" (my term, not DB's); an ACS that made the jump from referring to the here and now to referring to the distant and far. No such link exists

• Therefore, ACSs grew out of non-communication behaviors

• Uniqueness of language also not relevant because many species have unique features (Pinker's elephant trunk, 20).
  

• Humans suddenly had something else to "talk" about other than the here and now and THAT'S what spurned language.

• The new thing humans had was abstract concepts (22). We can talk about dogs as a category (he makes an important distinction between categories and concepts much later in chapter 4 at the bottom of page 87).

• This new ability to abstract is not associated with evolutionary fitness.

• Critical Point: other species didn't develop language because they didn't need language (p 24).

• Bickerton's 4 tests for any theory of language evolution: 1) uniqueness, 2) ecology, 3) credibility, 4) selfishness (p28). Bolles' blog Babel's Dawn discusses these criteria at length here.
  

Space and Thought

(two of Boroditsky's stimuli, pdf here)

Yet again, Andrew Sullivan treads into the area of linguistics and cognition research. But at least this time he's wise enough to make no comments about the studies he links to (he's typically misguided, or flat out wrong in his linguistic sensibilities, see here, here and here).

This time he reprints a quote here from an article titled How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? written by Stanford assistant professor Lera Boroditsky regarding how language influences thought. Of course, Sullivan reprints the least interesting piece of information in the article, a mere behavioral anecdote about how speakers of different languages use different direction terms. This fact has been well known for a long time (I first learned about it in an introductory cog sci course in 1998 and it was old news then). The more interesting fact is the following effect she observed during a test to compare Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue (color terms is a classic topic within cognitive science going back to Berlin & Kay's work in the sixties, see here):

The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.

After skimming Boroditsky's article, I felt had it was a very good review of the field of language and thought studies as I remember it, but it didn't add much, if anything, but it's clearly a layperson's article, so I looked at her Stanford page and skimmed her list of publications and more critically, the references she cites.

My first impression was, "she doesn't cite much, does she?" I'm used to experimental psychology articles containing lists of references almost as long as the article itself, but most of her (first author) papers have a handful of citations. But the more surprising thing was the notable absence of two names, Len Talmy and Jürgen Bohnemeyer. I'll grant that I'm a little biased because both of them were professor's at my grad school, but the granting ends there. I can't imagine writing a serious research paper on how language shapes thought without references to one or both of these researchers, especially as Talmy has written an extensive, typologically rich, two volume set on the relationship between language ands thought: Toward a Cognitive Semantics and he has a forthcoming book The Attention System of Language (his work in progress handout on the same topic can be read in this pdf).

Don't get me wrong, I basically like Boroditsky's research methods and approach. I just think it's time for her to review Talmy and Bohnemeyer.

Yo! Google This!

(screen shot of Google Spell Check)

Apparently, Gmail spell check does not recognized "googled" as a word (past tense of "to google"). Will Microsoft spell checkers recognize "binged" as a word?

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

Adam's Tongue pt 1

(pic of hardback cover of Adam's Tongue)

On July 6th, I will be leading my DC area book club, Books and Banter, in our meeting on the new book Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans by Derek Bickerton (Hardcover - Mar 17, 2009).

Amazon’s Product Description:
Language is unique to humans, but it isn’t the only thing that sets us apart from other species—our cognitive powers are qualitatively different. So could there be two separate discontinuities between humans and the rest of nature? No, says Bickerton; he shows how the mere possession of symbolic units—words—automatically opened a new and different cognitive universe, one that yielded novel innovations ranging from barbed arrowheads to the Apollo spacecraft.

(opening page 3 of my copy of Adam's Tongue)

Since this book coheres closely with this blog’s topic of linguistics, I’m going to be posting my notes and thoughts as I read and prep for the discussion. I won’t guarantee that I’ll revise and clean up my notes into entirely coherent prose (see pics above for my typically messy method of “reading” a book on linguistics...the left page was originally blank), but if you’re reading the book too, I hope this encourages your thoughtfulness and stimulates your critical reading.

This first post will cover only the Introduction, pages 3-15. On general note: as I am no longer affiliated with a university, it is remarkably difficult for me to follow leads involving academic papers; therefore, many of the references Bicketon makes to published works (such as Derek Penn’s intriguing list of things humans can do that non-humans cannot, p8) are, for the time being, locked behind an impenetrable vault for the lowly lay Lousy Linguist and as such must go un-reviewed. Apologies. I shall review all that time and Google together permit.

Shall we begin?

My first reaction is that that the intro is written as a teaser (like most pop writing intros) and as such it leaves lots of questions to be answered. This begs the question: will the rest of the book live up to the tease? I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m guarded in my expectations. We shall see.

MAJOR POINTS

1. Thought experiment (p 3) – “imagine for a moment that you don’t have language and nobody else has either.” Okay…hmmm…uh…wait, what? First, as a linguist, I HAVE to ask: what is your definition of language? This is a non-trivial question. If you want me to understand how X originated, then you should help me understand exactly what X is. Note: the book index contains no entry for “language” per se.

UPDATE (June 17): the excellent blog Babel's Dawn (on the origins of speech), responds to Bickerton by asking a similar question: how is language to be defined, and then offering definitions here (HT The Outer Horde):

2. Language makes thought meaningful by putting thoughts together into meaningful wholes (pp 3-4). Okay, so language is combinatorial syntax? Can’t we say the same thing about logic? Language is logic?

3. Darwin: having the tool of language caused us to develop greater cognitive capacity (p 5).
Is this similar to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel argument that the coincidental cooccurrence of geography, people, ecosystems was the “ultimate cause” of Western dominance? I fear Bickerton may have an “ultimate cause” nightmare on his hand.

4. FOXP2 – Only one indexed reference to FOXP2 (p110). He disparages the “brouhaha” around FOXP2 and I agree with his point here (there’s no such thing as a “gene for language”); nonetheless, FOXP2 is an interesting gene worth discussing at length, I think. Yet, I wonder if this brevity isn’t an editorial function. I recall the physicist Stephen Hawking retelling a caveat his publisher gave him when writing A Brief History of Time that every mathematical equation he chose to include in the book would cut his readership in half. Perhaps the same could be said for each gene referenced.

5. Magic Moment (p 6) – Apparently he’s looking to explain the “magic moment” when our distant ancestors broke from other communication methods and started using language (uh...cough...hmm...please see 1).

6. Discontinuity (p 9) – evolutionary leaps = differences between species not attributable to gradual change.

7. Niche construction (p 11) – we “guide” our own evolution. I don’t like the use of the word “guide” here. Sounds too intentional. Better if it’s just “affect”.

8. Learning vs. instinct (p11) – he writes “we adapt our environment to suit ourselves, in the same way ants and termites adapt the environment to suit them. We do it by learning, they do it by instinct; big deal." Whoa! Whoa! Yes, this IS a big deal. Let us not trivialize the distinction between learning and instinct. I’ve had just enough exposure to computational neuroscience to recognize that this is no small distinction.

MINOR POINTS

P 4 – “without language there wouldn’t be scientific questions” – here’s my interpretation of what he means: 1) the things we ask questions about exist apart from us but 2) the fact that we ask questions about them (and not others) is a function of our cognitive apparatus (this is a variation on Lakoff’s embodied consciousness, right?). The fact that our embodied consciousness leads us to ask certain questions (and not others) does NOT mean that those questions are a priori more important than other questions; it only means that we consider them more important. We could be wrong.

P 5 – Quoting Darwin does not impress me any more than quoting Aristotle or Buddha or Chomsky: it’s all argument from authority and I have little patience for it.

P 9 – “in this book, for the first time ever, I’m going to show...” This reminds me of a point Foucault made in, I believe, History of Sexuality vol 1, that there is a tempting addiction to being the one who sees and reports the “truth” that others do not. As I recall, his point was that this temptation leads people to report “truths” that are, in fact, not true. Rather narcissistic, really, don’t you think? Is Bickerton a wise man or a narcissist? We shall see.

P 10 – I like this idea of niche construction and “constant feedback loop”. Sounds entirely commonsensical. Of course we affect our environment (despite the claims of global warming skeptics).
P 13 – I like this point that any given communication system is suited only to take care of that species needs (not some lego block building up of features and functions).

P 15 – the big question: what did our ancestors do (that other species did not do) that caused language to explode?

I am a skeptic by nature but I am intrigued, yet doubtful. The difficult part lay before me. 12 chapters of challenging linguistic exploration. Okay, Professor Bickeron. I accept the challenge. Lay on, Macduff, And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'

Taco Verbs

(screen shot of this blog's Sitemeter data)

A reader apparently was interested in "verbs that describes tacos." Since the IP address shows the Indiana Department of Education, I got 20 bucks says this was done by a lunch lady writing out next week's menu.

As for the "linguistics aspect", well, verbs don't describe nouns (like "tacos"), adjectives do. Verbs represent events. Rather, adjectives describe nouns. So, in the interest of serving my readers, exactly what kind of of adjectives describe tacos? Let's go to the experts:

Taco Bell:

• crunchy taco
• soft taco
• taco supreme(bonus points for postnominal adjective)
• double decker taco.

Cupertino Who?

(screen shot from Variety.com)

In publicizing the cancellation of the ABC show 'Samantha Who' (NOTE the network, kids, it becomes critical...), the famed entertainment industry mag Variety published a brief story rife with typos and bizarre errors, but in particular one jumped out at me:

ABC had been mulling a plan to decrease “Samantha’s” budget by changing the way the show is shot -- moving from single-cam to a multicamera format. Alphabet was looking to slash as much as $500,000 per episode from the show’s budget.

I highlighted in blue the strange error. It appears as though the network name 'ABC' has been miscorrected to 'Alphabet' (see Language Log's extensive discussions of this phenomenon they have called the Cupertino Effect, for example here as well as Ben Zimmer's discussion here).

Upon first glance, this makes some sense, right? 'ABC' is a common way to refer to the Romanized alphabet ("do you know your ABCs" one might ask a child). But what is truly perplexing is the randomness of the effect. The string 'ABC' occurs 5 times (including the title) and the string 'alphabet' occurs twice. As far as I can tell, there is no consistent context causing this. The first example of 'alphabet' occurs at the beginning of a sentence as a bare noun, and there are 4 examples of 'ABC' occuring in this context (including the title). The second example occurs in a definite NP headed by 'the' while the string 'ABC' does not occur in this context.

If you can find a triggering context, please let me know. Your guess is as good as mine...

UPDATE: myl makes a critical point in the comments that this is an inside joke at Variety and not a Cupertino, then I wonder what the joke context is, just fyi, ya know...too much color?

Frikkin Spelling

This cartoon is floating round the innerwebs today (HT Daily Dish; couldn't figure out who the original source is). 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). 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." Not bad.).

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).

Just for kicks, I googled as many faux fucking spelling variations as I could dream up. Listed by frequency, we can see that Pooh's "fucken" variation is middle of the road:

123,000,000 for fucking
24,200,000 for fuckin
10,300,000 for freakin
2,040,000 for frickin
1,880,000 for fucken
502,000 for fukkin
298,000 for frikkin
208,000 for fukken
206,000 for freekin
45,300 for frakken (highly ambiguous with some Swedish word)

Obama's Tango Conspiracy?

(screen shot from MSNBC's video)

Having nothing whatever to do with linguistics, nonetheless I feel compelled to report what seems like an entirely unreported snub by US President Barack Obama to the President of Argentina Cristina Kirchner. Watch MSNBC's video of the second photo shoot and you'll see Obama walk across the entire group to go shake hands with Canada's PM Stephen Harper (who missed the original shoot), but he passed right in front of Kirchner who raised her hand out to shake Obama's, but he ignored her entirely (creating a somewhat awkward moment), shook Harper's hand, then refused to make eye contact with Kirchner afterwords. I count that as two snubs.

Watch the video at Olbermann's "Countdown" site and at about 40 seconds in you'll see the moments I'm talking about. MSNBC's footage seems to be the only one with a wide enough angle to show the snubs.

The relevant frootage is here:
April 2, 2009; #5 "Obama meets the world press"

(psssst, this has nothing to do with anything; just random rumor mongering...which is fun, ya know...)

Family Guy Linguistics

(screen shot from Family Guy via Hulu)

The most recent Family Guy episode ("Family Gay": Season 7, Episode 8 ) relied on some interesting linguistics in two separate jokes.

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):

What's this? It looks like 'Till Death has taken a right turn and is heading into the stands. Dear god! 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. Haw, well at least the horse raced past the class of visiting deaf second graders...oh no! 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.

Having never studied the linguistics of sign language, my first reaction was to ask, are there truly phonemes in sign langauge? In spoken language, a phoneme is a conceptual clustering of phonetic segments into a single group. 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"). So, there is a difference in how we articulate /p/ depending on where it occurs in a word. Nonetheless, we still consider both versions of /p/ to be "the same sound." We say there is a single phoneme [p] with two phonetic realizations, aspirated and unaspirated.

But this use of "phoneme" is based on spoken language. How does this relate to signed languages like ASL? 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. 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). 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. We then extract feature descriptors based on principal component analysis (PCA) to represent the segments efficiently. These high level features are used with k-means to cluster the segments to form phonemes." 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. Cool stuff, for sure. 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. I'm still looking for more on that topic.

Nonetheless, there remains the issue of the Family Guy writers getting the nature of phonemes fundamentally wrong. Phonemes convey no meaning (excusing for the moment the weak possibility of sound symbolic associations). 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. And just how complicated are the signs for dread and terror anyway?

(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." 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. A nice example of construction priming, eh? I'm primed to read any "X raced past Y" clause as being a reduced relative).


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).

Lois: Peter, what exactly did they inject you with?

Peter: Oh all sorts of things. Hepatitis vaccine, a couple of steroids, the gay gene, calcium, a vitamin B extract...

Lois: What did you just say?

Peter: The gay gene. 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).

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"). But in this case, one earlier item was more "unusual" than the others.

Let's re-explain this using conversational pragmatics and Gricean maxims, okay?

Peter lists five items. He believes that one of the five items is controversial while the other four are not. He believes Lois believes this too. The controversial item is in the middle of the list. Peter believes he articulated each item clearly such that Lois could properly hear all items. He believes Lois believes this too. 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. He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes Lois is not flouting conversational norms. He believes Lois believes this too. Therefore, Peter believes Lois is trying to make her contribution (her question) informative (maxim of quantity). He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes that repeating a well heard, uncontroversial item has no information value. He believes Lois believes this too. Thus, he infers that "what" must refer to some item other than the last one. He believes Lois believes this too. Peter believes there is only one item on the list that meets the information value requirement. He believes Lois believes this too.

This is a long-winded way of saying the same thing Peter did, but we linguists have to make things complicated and technical. It's our job.

Taco Bell Grammar

The grammar of my recent Taco Bell receipt is remarkably interesting. Here's my faithful transcription of the actual receipt pictured above:

THANK'S FOR CHOOSING TACO BELL 3009
HAVE YOU WON YOUR $ 1000 YET ?
IF YOU DON'T PLEASE ASK A CASHIER
HOW YOU CAN . . .
WE APPRECIATE YOUR BUSINESS
PLEASE LET US KNOW HOW WE DID IT
CALL US AT ( 510 ) 844-0764
OR CALL THE MANAGER.

Linguistically, there are some obviously interesting and not so obviously interesting features of this receipt.

1. They used an apostrophe for "thanks"
2. An unnecessary space between "$" and "1000"
3. An unnecessary space between "yet" and the question mark
4. Incorrect verb choice in the conditional clause ("do" instead of "have")
5. Extraneous pronoun "it" at the end of a clause
6. Unnecessary spaces after and before "(" and ")"

(1) is a common typo/error/misunderstanding. (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). (4) and (5) seem to be legitimate grammar errors.

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.

Finally, and perhaps most compelling of all, at the bottom, they got the Bagging Summary wrong. There were three items, not two.

A Working Class Hero Is Something To Be…

(screen shot from Hulu's State of the Nation feed)

"And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma."
U.S. President Barack Obama, State of the Nation speech (Feb 24, 2009)

My first reaction is to agree. I think this is a great vision of the future of our country. But President Obama was wise to note the problem of increasing costs of tuition. When I started state college in California in 1989, I spent $198 on tuition per semester. It jacked up to almost $1000 per semester by the time I graduated four years later. The same school now charges over $2000 per semester to attend. This same school was free when I started elementary school.

But what does Obama’s vision of increased post-secondary school training really mean? Is this feasible? The realist in me is forced to think of what this means to actual day-to-day classroom teaching. Does this mean overcrowding post-secondary institutions with sub-par students? That's not good. 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?

I know of what I speak. I spent 12 years teaching at colleges and universities. 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. None of these were elite colleges. 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. This experience gave me a very good sense of the skills and needs of the "average" college student in America. Most were poorly prepared and that affected my day-to-day lesson plans.

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. The average private college in America looks nothing like Harvard or Stanford. Far from it. They look like businesses.

• They charge $10,000 to $20,000 per year for tuition.

• They tend to focus on one or two vocational majors (like occupational therapy or veterinary technician).

• They tend to have 1000-4000 students.

• They tend to employ large numbers of part-time adjunct faculty (cheap labor and my bread and butter for 12 years).

• They tend to skimp on “non-essential” courses.

I believe President Obama really wants to attain his dream of educational opportunities for all. I believe he genuinely wants to reform teacher training and incentives. 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. In 1975, Obama’s vision would have been feasible. After 1995, his vision became a nightmare.

Can we really expect all Americans to attain post-secondary education under current circumstances? I suspect not.

UPDATE: the AP has published a story addressing this very issue and contains a variety of perspectives here.

UPDATE 2: the Chronicle of Higher Education has a related story on the increasing costs of college here (HT Daily Dish).

Bale's Accent Grammar

(pic from TheCinemaSource.com)

Exactly what happened to Christian Bale's accent during his famous rant now buzzing around the interwebs? Listen to this 2002 interview with the "Welsh born" actor, then listen to the famous rant here. 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). 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). 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.

I never studied the factors of accent change, but it seems like an interesting topic. 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.

I'd be curious to know how phonologists have modeled accents. 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)? This seems like a non-trivial distinction.

Pleasant Surprise at LSA

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). 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. 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. The problem is the format: 20 minute presentations with 10 minutes for Q&A. That's a tough set to play. 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. Professional academics get maybe one or two chances a year to perfect the art of presentation.

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. He and co-author Tomas Riad presented an OT account of metrical phenomenon. By all rights, I should have been half asleep. I am neither a phonologist nor an OT adherent. 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. He is a natural teacher. His students at Frenso probably have no clue how lucky they are to have such a good teacher.

Their Presentation: Chris Golston (California State University, Fresno), Tomas Riad (Stockholm University): A constraint-based view of English meter.

What Is a Word?

(picture definition of the "word" zazen)

The nature of a word's meaning has been an Achilles Heel, stumbling linguistics for hundreds of years. For example, Pāṇini's 4th Century Sanskrit grammar Astadhyayi (Aṣṭādhyāyī - अष्टाध्यायी) appears to have accepted that "the authority of the popular usage of words … must supersede the authority of the meaning dependent on derivation. The meanings of words (the relations between word and meaning) are also established by popular usage" (more here).

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). It's an interesting project, linguistically as well as artistically. 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. 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. 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. If anything, it confused me because I could imagine any number of conflicting meanings associated with that one pitcures. No one meaning was salient. This is classic function/structuralist linguistics. Cognitive semantics grew out of exactly this kind of problem.

And, for the record, my answer to the question in this post's title is this: I have no idea. See Princeton's Construction Site for more on my confusion.