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.

Crazy Economics

(pic from The New Yorker)

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.

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).

My New Favorite Quote

(pic from NBC)

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.)