a debate!

From The Economist: This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think. Discuss...

A new drink from the SPECULATIVE GRAMMARIAN:

The Psycholinguist

wine (any kind: color is not a dependent variable in this study)
several glasses
1 stopwatch

Pour the wine into a glass while whining about how no one has properly modeled the process of wine pouring. Observe the wine under controlled conditions for an hour. Present a wordy but content-less paper to an international conference on what wine might look like in infants. Rerun the analysis in a different glass in case the receptor affects the nature of the process. Wait another hour. Drink the wine. Drink more wine. Fall onto the floor drunk, bumping your head on a pipe on the way down. Write an even less coherent paper on the effects of head bumping on linguistic processing. Gain professorship.

pimp grammar

There's a pimp's handwritten business plan floating around the interwebz. While the soundness of its basic logic cannot be denied ("Treat This Pimpin Like it's a Business" indeed), the former writing teacher in me could not help but pull out the old red pen and make a few suggestions. But here's the thing, it's a fact of contemporary college education that most writing teachers are loath to outright criticize or correct their students (they're paying tuition after all). You see, outside of the Ivy League, most college writing teachers are faced with whole classrooms filled with pimps like Keep It Pimpin', and they're our bread and butter (we can't all be blessed with students like the Winkelvi, can we?). As a result, we are careful to word our feedback delicately, so as not to offend the senses of the ones who pad our, admittedly thin, paychecks*.

*Absolute truth: I taught college level research writing courses for the whopping total price of $1250/semester. The MOST I ever got paid for teaching a college level course was $2800. In the (modified) words of my literary hero DJay:

You know it's hard out here for a [rhetoric & writing instructor].
When he tryin to get this money for the rent.
For the Cadillacs and gas money spent
Because a whole lotta [students] talkin [nonsense].

HT kottke.

a brief history of stanford linguistics dissertations

The above image comes from the Stanford Dissertation Browser and is centered on Linguistics. This tool performs some kind of textual analysis of Stanford dissertations: every dissertation is taken as a weighted mixture of a unigram language model associated with every Stanford department. This lets us infer, that, say, dissertation X is 60% computer science, 20% physics, and so on...Essentially, the visualization shows word overlap between departments measured by letting the dissertations in one department borrow words from another department..

Thus, the image above suggests that Linguistics borrows more words from Computer Science, Education, and Psychology than it does from other disciplines. What was most interesting was using the Back button to creating a moving picture of dissertation language over the last 15 years. you'll see a lot of bouncing back and forth. Stats makes a couple jumps here and there.

HT Razib Khan

the baffling linguistics of job postings

While Googling around for other things, I caught this odd fish contained within a job posting for an Account Manager:

DISCLAIMER: ... Linguistics used herein may use First Person Singular and First Person Plural grammatical person construction for and with the meaning of Third Person Singular and Third Person Plural references. We reserves the right to amend and change responsibilities to meet business and organizational needs as necessary (emphasis added).

If I understand this correctly, the bold faced passage says that the authors are allowing themselves to use constructions like "we walks..." and "we talks..."

But, if you look at the uses of "we" within the text of the actual job posting, nowhere do they actually do this, EXCEPT in the disclaimer itself. I find this baffling. What is the purpose of this? Simply to allow them to write "We reserves..." I Googled the sentence and found it popping up in all kinds of job postings and the same thing is true. The only time a posting invokes its self-appointed right to this grammatical modification, is within the disclaimer. It appears to be boiler-plate job-speak of some kind. I'm remarkably freaked out by this.

how to spot an academic con artist

If you've been to college, you were taught how to scrutinize research sources at some point. Let's test your skills, shall we? Imagine you run across a popularized article and the author promotes his own expertise using the following:

• "Ph.D" after his name.
• Referencing his multiple books.
• Noting his academic appointments.
• You look at his personal web page list of publications and you see dozens of articles and books going back several decades.

Must be an expert, right? Must be legit, right? This is what I saw for John Medina, Ph.D., author of the HuffPo article 'Parentese': Can Speaking To Your Baby This Way Make Her Smarter? But I quickly became suspicious about this man's credentials. Why? Let's look more closely at those bullet points:

• "Ph.D" after his name.
I recall a professor once saying something like "Once you've been to grad school, everyone you know has a Ph.D. It's just not that special." This may sound elitist, but the truth is, most people with Ph.Ds don't use the alphabet to promote themselves. They use their body of work. I'm almost always suspicious of people who promote themselves using their degrees. Plus, nowhere on his own site does he list a CV or even where he got his Ph.D. I had to find this at the UW web page, listing "PhD, Molecular Biology, Washington State University, 1988" and impressive degree, no doubt, but why hide this? It has become common practice for serious academics to provide their full CV on their web page. Medina fails to follow this practice.
• Referencing his multiple books.
All of his books are aimed at non-academics. There's nothing wrong with trying to explain your expertise to a lay audience, but at some point you should also be trying to explain your expertise top other experts.
• Noting his academic appointments.
Here, Medina does seem to have some impressive qualifications. He is an "Affiliate Professor, Bioengineering" at The University of Washington. As well as director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University (which, as far as I can tell, is a house and has exactly two members, the director and his assistant).
• You look at his personal web page list of publications and you see dozens of articles and books going back several decades.
This is the most suspicious by far. Yes he lists dozens of publications, but almost all of them are short, 2-4 page articles IN THE SAME MAGAZINE, Psychiatric Times, a dubious looking magazine at best. The only others are in the equally dubious looking Geriatric Times. His publications page does list a REFEREED PAPERS section with some more legitimate academic articles, but he's second or third author on almost all.

Add to this the fact that his recommendations seem to be little more than common sense (i.e., talk to your kids more...no duh!). I have no problem with someone making money off their education, but this seems to be an example of trying to con people into believing he has more to say than he really does simply because of the letters P-h-D after his name.

Despite writing this, I don't feel terribly comfortable casting aspersions on someone who may indeed be a serious, legitimate academic. If I have made mistakes in this critique, I will apologize. But then again it is incumbent upon Medina to do a better job of representing his credentials. And it is incumbent upon us as us a lay readers (hey, I ain't no molecular biologists either) to scrutinize supposed experts who are asking us to pay for their expertise (in the form of book prices and speaking fees).

94,000 language deaths!

History's only Emmy-nominated linguist* K. David Harrison answers questions over at The Johnson blog about language death, his favorite topic. He repeats what he's been saying for the last few years about language death, and he generally makes good points; however, he says two things worth responding to:

1. "The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages"
2. "...bilingualism strengthens the brain"

The first one is a vague and complicated claim often promoted by language-deathers** and the second is a goofy metaphor (at best). Let's walk through the reasons why these statements should not be a part of a serious discussion of language death:

The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages
My primary critique of this claim is that it's just not clear what it really means. In what way does a language uniquely encode information? Harrison provides a few simple examples, mostly lexical items that show us how a particular language fore-fronted particular features to encode, and the argument is that that tells us something about that culture's perceptions of what was important to them. This is probably true to some extant, but honestly, we still do not understand language well enough to truly understand what lexical features tell us about a culture. This is hyperbole at best. But this is NOT an argument against language death per se, it's just a fact.

So what if we lose some facts about a culture's perceptions of the world? Let's assume there are 6000 language alive today. How many have already died? We don't know. For a rough estimate, let's draw an analogy and ask the question, how many humans have ever lived? A few years ago, the Population Reference Bureau did a "semi-scientific" guesstimate of this question and determined that less than 6% of all people who had ever lived, were still alive in 2002. If we assume that languages come and go at a pace that correlates with populations, then we can assume that the current 6000 living languages are about 6% of the total number of languages that ever existed. That means the total number of languages that have ever existed is around 100,000***. This means we've already lost 94,000 languages that were never documented. 94,000 language deaths. 94,000 lost knowledge bases. Oh, the horror, the horror!

Exactly how bad off should we currently be if Harrison is correct about the ill effects of language death now that we know we've lost 94,000 languages? Are we really that bad off? Clearly the answer is no, we're not that bad off. If losing 94,000 languages has not caused grave danger to humanity, why would losing another 3,000?

Yes, I agree that all languages have unique linguistic properties that are worth studying in themselves. But just because we find interesting data in every language does NOT mean we should stop language death per se. We need a broader understanding of the system of language interaction and language evolution, otherwise stopping language death may be as irresponsible as causing language death. Genetics blogger Razib Khan has made a compelling argument that "high linguistic diversity is not conducive to economic growth, social cooperation, and amity." This is just one speculative claim, but at least it's a voice on the other side of this issue.


bilingualism strengthens the brain
This is just goofy phrasing. He's referencing important neurolinguistic research, so why trivialize it by using such patently absurd language?



*I actually don't know this to be true, definitively.
**Ooooh, I'm being a little caustic there, hehe.
***This estimate is remarkably similar to the ones David Crystal discusses in his book Language Death. In that book, he says anywhere from 64,000 to 140,000 is a reasonable guesstimate. My 100,000 splits that damn near down the middle.