Saturday, February 7, 2009
Bale's Accent Grammar
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.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
What Is a Word?
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Crazy Economics
The econo-blogger Daniel Hamermesh recently lamented his "English guilt" (i.e., it's easier for native speakers of English to publish scholarly papers because English is the lingua franca of academics). This is a fine point (I'm not sure it's true, but it's worth debating).However, he decided to link to a story about Crazy English to establish the world-wide interest in learning English (see Language Log postings about Crazy English here and here and read Amber R. Woodward's academic thesis on it here (pdf)).
I have no doubt that Crazy English has a large number of followers in China (20 million by one count), but it's hardly representative of the general, world-wide interest in the English language. Why did Hamermesh link to it? Just 'cause it crazy and goofy? Would he be happy if a linguistic blogger wrote about economics and linked to some crazy, goofy economics trends like ethanol subsidies and protectionist tariffs as if to say that these were somehow representative of world-wide interest in economics? I think I'd care less if he had a smaller megaphone, but he's blogging at one of the most frequently read blogs in the world, the NYT's Freakonomics blog (#64 on Technorati's list). That's a big megaphone. So be careful what you yell through it, Danny.
I have no doubt that Crazy English has a large number of followers in China (20 million by one count), but it's hardly representative of the general, world-wide interest in the English language. Why did Hamermesh link to it? Just 'cause it crazy and goofy? Would he be happy if a linguistic blogger wrote about economics and linked to some crazy, goofy economics trends like ethanol subsidies and protectionist tariffs as if to say that these were somehow representative of world-wide interest in economics? I think I'd care less if he had a smaller megaphone, but he's blogging at one of the most frequently read blogs in the world, the NYT's Freakonomics blog (#64 on Technorati's list). That's a big megaphone. So be careful what you yell through it, Danny.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Sullivan's Silly Semantics
The Daily Dish, often a conduit for linguistic prescriptivism (see here), also displays its fair share of awkward and questionable linguistic practices. Take the following modal verb coordination as a case in point:
"Megan believes the government shouldn't and can't successfully refinance people's mortgages."
I find the coordination of shouldn't and can't syntactically awkward and semantically ill-formed (or is it the other way 'round?). The traditional, Linguistics 101 explanation of modal verbs is that they express possibility and necessity. Typically, the modal should expresses a level of necessity in that it means one is obligated to some extent to perform the action under question. However, the modal can is highly ambiguous between a possibility and necessity reading. So, the sentence you can jump is ambiguous between you are allowed to jump and you have the physical ability to jump. In the absence of disambiguating information (such as Gricean pragmatics), I have no default or preferred interpretation (perhaps you do). My impression is that there is also a register difference between shouldn't (high) and can't (low). So my reaction is driven in part by the contrasting functions and registers of shouldn't and can't.
Am I alone in this interpretation? Let's see. Being a corpus linguist at heart, I went to the data. I performed a Google search to determine the frequency of the relevant collocations (for a nice discussion of why I should NOT use Google for this kind of thing, see Kilgarriff's Googleology is Bad Science, but I'm a blogger, so screw it, haha):
Base Frequencies
4,290,000,000 for can
1,630,000,000 for should
1,410,000,000 for could
692,000,000 for can't
617,000,000 for cannot
81,000,000 for shouldn't
'shouldn't and X'
46,400 for shouldn't and can't
7,140 for shouldn't and cannot
2,630 for shouldn't and couldn't
2 for shouldn't and can not
1 for shouldn't and could not
'should not and X'
276,000 for should not and cannot
53,200 for should not and can not
52,600 for should not and could not
30 for should not and can't
No results found for should not and couldn't
'should and can'
703,000 for should and can
'should and could'
365,000 for should and could
Variations
7,160,000 for can and should
1,360,000,000 for must
340,000,000 for shall
107,000 for can't and shouldn't
291,000 for should and must
36,200 for should and shall
Results: I included the base modals and their collocations to round out the picture of the overall frequency of these words. Many other searches could have been performed to provide an even more complete picture of the frequencies of modals. The mini-data here show that should and can is the most frequent collocation. Sullivan's shouldn't and can't is the fourth most frequent negated collocation.
Discussion: Given the low frequency of Sullivan's collocation, plus the high frequency of the non-negated version, plus the high frequency of can't alone, I take this to be evidence that his phrase is generally dispreferred (i.e., I am not alone). The large difference in the base-form collocation should and can (703,000) and the negated version shouldn't and can't (46,400) is interesting. It is worth noting that most of the negated versions were in roughly the same range as shouldn't and can't (with the high frequency should not and cannot exception).
"Megan believes the government shouldn't and can't successfully refinance people's mortgages."
I find the coordination of shouldn't and can't syntactically awkward and semantically ill-formed (or is it the other way 'round?). The traditional, Linguistics 101 explanation of modal verbs is that they express possibility and necessity. Typically, the modal should expresses a level of necessity in that it means one is obligated to some extent to perform the action under question. However, the modal can is highly ambiguous between a possibility and necessity reading. So, the sentence you can jump is ambiguous between you are allowed to jump and you have the physical ability to jump. In the absence of disambiguating information (such as Gricean pragmatics), I have no default or preferred interpretation (perhaps you do). My impression is that there is also a register difference between shouldn't (high) and can't (low). So my reaction is driven in part by the contrasting functions and registers of shouldn't and can't.
Am I alone in this interpretation? Let's see. Being a corpus linguist at heart, I went to the data. I performed a Google search to determine the frequency of the relevant collocations (for a nice discussion of why I should NOT use Google for this kind of thing, see Kilgarriff's Googleology is Bad Science, but I'm a blogger, so screw it, haha):
Base Frequencies
4,290,000,000 for can
1,630,000,000 for should
1,410,000,000 for could
692,000,000 for can't
617,000,000 for cannot
81,000,000 for shouldn't
'shouldn't and X'
46,400 for shouldn't and can't
7,140 for shouldn't and cannot
2,630 for shouldn't and couldn't
2 for shouldn't and can not
1 for shouldn't and could not
'should not and X'
276,000 for should not and cannot
53,200 for should not and can not
52,600 for should not and could not
30 for should not and can't
No results found for should not and couldn't
'should and can'
703,000 for should and can
'should and could'
365,000 for should and could
Variations
7,160,000 for can and should
1,360,000,000 for must
340,000,000 for shall
107,000 for can't and shouldn't
291,000 for should and must
36,200 for should and shall
Results: I included the base modals and their collocations to round out the picture of the overall frequency of these words. Many other searches could have been performed to provide an even more complete picture of the frequencies of modals. The mini-data here show that should and can is the most frequent collocation. Sullivan's shouldn't and can't is the fourth most frequent negated collocation.
Discussion: Given the low frequency of Sullivan's collocation, plus the high frequency of the non-negated version, plus the high frequency of can't alone, I take this to be evidence that his phrase is generally dispreferred (i.e., I am not alone). The large difference in the base-form collocation should and can (703,000) and the negated version shouldn't and can't (46,400) is interesting. It is worth noting that most of the negated versions were in roughly the same range as shouldn't and can't (with the high frequency should not and cannot exception).
Saturday, December 13, 2008
My New Favorite Quote
Having missed the entire new season of 30 Rock so far, I finally started catching up on past episodes. And it turns out, I now have a new favorite quote:
I don't like hypotheticals. It's like lying to your brain.
Kenneth the page
How would Kenneth have assessed the Ramsey Test?
(psssst, a running a close second is Kenneth's other great quote from the same episode: There's a whole cable channel that just tells you what's on the other channels.)
I don't like hypotheticals. It's like lying to your brain.
Kenneth the page
How would Kenneth have assessed the Ramsey Test?
(psssst, a running a close second is Kenneth's other great quote from the same episode: There's a whole cable channel that just tells you what's on the other channels.)
Monday, December 8, 2008
awesome
I moved back to California just about 6 weeks ago after spending about 15 years on the East Coast and I've noticed the frequency of the word "awesome" in my daily speech as skyrocketed ... ahhh, it's good to be home.
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