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.

UPDATE: My second post on this is here and my third is here.

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.