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December 15 Making sense languages being presented at the LSAThe 2007 meeting for the Linguistics Society of America is happening in early January down in Anahiem (http://www.lsadc.org/info/meet-annual.cfm). There are lots of fascinating topics, but of course some of them are impossible to understand if you're not already in the argot. I'm hoping to post a summary of jargon definitions, but for this post, I just want to go through some of the lesser known languages that are being talked about. Some pretty fun ones. (I've highlighted the African languages.) Karitiana
Rotokas
Chemehuevi
Totonaco
Ket
Dagbani
Kagayanen
Kuuku Ya'u
Assamese
Agaw
Oshiwambo
Lango
Skwxw?7mesh
December 03 Lights, camera, memory!One of my classes this semester is "Language and Cognition" with Lera Boroditsky. Basically, we're asking what's called the Whorfian question--does language shape thought? If I grow up in a language without numbers, do I actually think differently than someone who grows up counting?
Right now I'm started on a research paper about metaphors on the Internet. One of the things I'm searching for is an old cog sci idea about dealing with new situations and remembering old ones ("scripts and schemas"). Yesterday Gus asked me why I was so terrible about remembering to not put fuzzy things in the washer with non-fuzzy things and/or to not put queen sheets in the washer folded in a perfect square so that they don't get clean. He wondered how a reasonably smart fellow could be so immune to correcting these behaviors.
Today, I came across a discussion of memory that sort of connects the research paper and the laundry talk.
Perhaps my template for laundry is tremendously basic (separate colors and whites; add soap; use the right temperature; get it over fast). The question still remains why I don't update the template. Scripts are hard to change? I don't want to devote the energy to something trivial? I like having my attention elsewhere? I think the consequences aren't that big of a deal? You can find more thoughts on memory at http://blog.dandelife.com/archives/461. October 13 Talking about Desperately Seeking Susan - New York Times
From an op-ed piece about Susan B. Anthony, some good quotes:
September 16 More linguistics warsToday in the park, trying not to be distracted by the Christian blues band or the faith healer calling for someone in the audience with some sort of lung problem (he wasn't sure what--cancer? he just knew they were out there), I read Elizabeth Bates' "On the Nature and Nuture of Language", a good review of the nativist position (Chomsky's camp--there's a special organ in the brain that does language) and the emergentist position (heir of psychologist Jean Piaget).
(This emergenist position is connected to complex systems theory, connectionism, parallel distributed processing, neural networks. It's also called interactionism and constructivism.)
Bates' paper is a pretty great start for thinking about debates in linguistics. She defines and walks through the various parts of phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics: "let us start by defining the different levels of the language system, and then go on to describe how each of these levels is procesed by normal adults, acquired by children, and represented in the brain" (3).
That means she points out that it's more in the nativist tradition to keep phonetics and phonology separate (whereas emergenists tend to think that the generalizations of phonologists "will ultimately be explained entirely in physical and pscyhophysical terms" (3). The nativists also argue for the structural independence of semantics and grammar, while the emergenists approach is to see some intimate relationship "using a combination of lexical and propositional semantics to explain the various meanings that are cofified in the grammar" (4).
(Bates' section on pragmatics gives some good definitions, but it's hard to sort out anything but that at this point in the field. As she points out, it is often called the wastebasket of linguistic theory (whenever your theory can't account for something, just say, "Oh, that's pragmatics." That said, pragmatics may just be a module, fed by phonetic, lexical, and grammatical systems, or it could be several modules (one for registering emotion, another for thinking about metaphor and irony, etc), or it could be outside the language module altogether. The emergenist position tends to be that pragmatics is the cause of linguistic structure itself (19).)
In the later sections of the paper, she looks at a similar split in psycholinguistics between "modularists" and "interactionists". The modularists believe that lexical and grammatical processing are independent and handled by separate mental/neural mechanisms. Each module does something and then you integrate them after they're all done. The interactionists "see word recognition and grammtical analysis as two sides of a single complex process: Word recogntion is 'penetrated' by sentence-level information" (12). There's a good review of the history of this debate and where the research is currently pointing:
Bates' own conclusions put her in the emergenist camp, though she seems relatively even-handed. Her final section compares relying on a language organ in the brain to calling a giraffe's neck a "high-leaf-eating organ" (20).
Bates died in 2003 after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. She was an internationally recognized authority in the science of how the brain is organized to process language. She helped found the UCSD department of cognitive science and worked with lots of different people from different disciplines on over 20 languages on four continents. From http://crl.ucsd.edu/bates/memorial/:
The Language WarI've been reading Robin Lakoff's The Language War (I'm about a third of the way through it--go get it here). I don't know Lakoff well--I at in on a class of hers last winter and visited her office this spring. That's enough that I can hear her voice in my head as I move through the book. It's a wonderful voice, world-weary, unrelieved. Her emphasis in speaking is different than mine--it's a relief not to always have your own voice in your head.
Lakoff's book is about who holds power and how they use language to keep or gain it. She's interested in how words like "liberal" become terms of abuse, how "politically correct" is really a cover for stopping newly emergent groups (blacks and women) from contending for a share of language rights. And most of all (where she believes most linguists will start questioning whether she's doing linguistics here), how narratives tell us how we're connected and who has power.
I'm especially impressed by the history of linguistics that the introduction offers (it's a chapter called, "What I am doing here and how I am doing it").
When I was talking to folks at Berkeley, I remember some of Lakoff's own colleagues saying, "Well, we're not really sure what Robin does. And we're not sure it is linguistics." Lakoff seems to be aware of that in this chapter as she defines where the field is, where it's come from, and how ill she fits into it. Nevertheless, she still gives what she hopes is a rich path for the field to pursue (one that is not particularly scientific).
Here's the history she charts:
1) Start of 20th century: off-shoot of anthropology (also "newish"). While people who had described indigenous languages up to this point had seen their disappearance as a good thing (they were primative), these new linguists saw them "as expressions of the complexity and variety of the human mind, and therefore not only worthy of study, but essential to study if we were to understand ourselves as a species" (3). This was especially urgent as folks figured out that many of America's indigenous cultures were nearing extinction.
2) The 1950s: the Chomsky revolution, which showed you had to take meaning into account at least superficially (the earlier stuff was all word lists and sound inventories). Chomsky's approach promised that "language could be a window into the mind, a glimpse into the universality of language capacities, and hence a way of achieving a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human" (4).
While this idea was catching on in the 1960s, a lot of universities were starting up or upgrading. Having a linguistics department was the thing to do and it was pretty cheap to get big name scholars and the grants they attracted.
Now here's the part that I love:
3) The 1970s: sociolinguists start figuring out that one's own culture is pretty exotic. They start challenging Chomsky's idea that variants and performance errors are unimportant and should be weeded out. (Mainly by having linguists come up with sentences at their desks, not by looking at how people actually talk.)
Across all of this is an enterprise to keep the field scientific. Yet Lakoff's path would ask things like, "How do we use language to avoid responsibility for ourselves and allocate it to others?" (See 7 for a list of questions she thinks are interesting.)
Lakoff is interested in how we are all part of multiple speech communities and we're always shifting around in these to make meaning.
This necessarily introduces a lot of complexity and she wants to consider all the causes and effects that involve linguistic expression (pretty much everything, as she points out). "The scientific method is not the only way we can arrive at understanding" (9). She accuses existing linguists of sneaking interpretation in so that their findings have any significance to them. She believes that's going to introduce more corruption than acknowledging and developing interpretive strategies. She thinks it's self-evident that these strategies will always be "partial and provisional" but perhaps, just as Donald Winnicott talked about "good enough mothering", we could have "good enough linguistic analysis". Not wholly satisfying for those of us who want to Prove Definitively, but a pretty good place for those of us who come from the humanities and appreciate motives, ambiguities, and subtleties. September 14 Putting time in motionAnswer this question: Next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting now that it has been rescheduled?
This weekend I read a fun paper that ties in nicely with calendar/event UI design (attached). We often use metaphors in designing user experiences, and even when we don’t, users still come up with metaphors to understand the interface. The most fundamental question the paper raises is, “How are we able to think about things that we’ve never been able to see or touch?” Like time, for example. A bunch of different studies have shown that most of the time 50% of people asked the question above answer, “Monday” and 50% of people answer “Friday” (fwiw, I say Friday by default. But my partner thinks I’m crazy and has no question that the right answer is Monday). Most people have strong intuitions about which answer to this question is correct. As will become clear in this paper, the question is indeed ambiguous and intuitions about the answers can change dramatically depending on context (though their feelings of certainty towards their answers generally remain intact). The answer generally depends on how people think about time—if they think of themselves as moving forward through time, then moving a meeting ‘forward’ is moving it further in their direction of motion (WàF). If they think of time as coming toward them, then ‘forward’ means putting the meeting on Monday.
What the paper goes on to show, however, is that there are all sorts of things you can do to people to make them feel like they are moving forward physically—and when they are in that sort of context, they are much more likely to answer “Friday” than “Monday”.
From past studies:
So it appears that thinking about spatial motion is what underlines thought about time. Thought about abstract things is built on mental representations of things people have experienced. But wait, there’s something more. We use motion verbs for some things that don’t even involve motion—this is called “fictive motion”, like The tattoo runs along his spine or The highway goes along the coast. Even though there is no observable physical motion, a lot of languages still use their motion verbs this way. Linguists estimate that the preponderance of languages in the world do use motion verbs to talk about time (Christmas is coming). There are lots of fun extras in this paper, but the core is that if you give someone a fictive motion sentence and then ask them about when the meeting is, people will answer “Friday” 70% of the time. If you give people similar sentences that don’t involve fictive motion (The tattoo is next to his spine, The highway is next to the coast) and then ask them about the rescheduled meeting, they’ll split 50-50. “Our results…indicate that thought about fictive motion does indeed influence the understanding of time.” This is a lot more startling than asking people while they travel since in reading these sentences they haven’t gone anywhere, yet their mind has nevertheless put things in motion. Matlock, T., Ramscar, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2003). The experiential basis of meaning. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. September 08 Those who...From Bertold Brecht:
September 04 Folklore indexIf you're interested in all the motifs of the stories you love, check out Stith-Thompson's numbered list. You can boil every pokey little puppy wrist-watch, Gus! A poem for later on in the yearThough I’ll admit that Kevin McFadden’s ‘Tone Deficit’ has some fun for linguists in Utah, the only good poem in this month’s issue of Poetry is Galway Kinnell’s ‘December 26’:
A Tuesday, day of Tiw, god of war, dawns in darkness. The short holiday day of talking by the fire, floating on snowshoes among ancient self-pollarded maple trees, visiting, being visited, giving a rain gauge, receiving red socks, watching snow buntings nearly over their heads in snow stab at spirtled bits of sunflower seeds the chickadees hold with their feet to a bough and hack apart, scattering debris like sloppy butchers, is over. Irregular life begins. Telephone calls, Google searches, evasive letters, complicated arrangements, faxes, second thoughts, consultations, e-mails, solemnly given kisses. French mooseA while back, Rich Rhodes told us about how when the Mikmak encountered cows, they named them 'French moose'. I like the image a lot. The Algonquins just called them by the word for 'buffalo'. Of course later on they forgot that and started calling real buffalo 'wild buffalo', which really is a little forgetful of them. They should've used the Mikmak. Ecology of the mindLast year Rich Rhodes mentioned an interesting fellow to us in a linguistics class that was primarily about describing and translating an endangered language of Mexico (Sayula Popoluca).
Gregory Bateson (married to Margaret Mead for a while) did research on schizophrenia and animal communication, among other things. He published "Steps to an Ecology of the Mind", which had the premise that ideas compete for attention at a particular time (this is 'intellectual history'). He asked, "What is an instinct?" and made the point that there are gentleman's agreements about what we ask about and how far we go. Every attempt to put a cap on abstractness failed, so for example, in phonology, you just move away from abstractness and go somewhere else. Bateson's thesis challenges what constitutes the grounds of an explanation. Not my favorite extinct mammal, but closeI'm still trying to find a picture of these weird antelope with antlers on their snouts (really!) but in the meantime, here's the big ole uintatherium. Which sounds like a nice addition to any home. (Oh, yeah, we were going to add a solarium, but we decided to get a uintatherium instead.) Poised, ready to strikeOne of the best things about visiting LA in days past was seeing Avital and Drew. Not quite so keen as that, but keen nevertheless, was their talking action figure of Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter. You press a button and he'd say "Crikey!" or "Poised, ready to strike" in that great Australian accent. We could talk or not talk about that for hours.
I'm sad to read that Steve just died--from a stingray, no less, which are actually pretty hard to get killed by (people step on their long barbed tails all the time and get taken to the hospital, but folks rarely die). It looks like swimming on top of one, its barb pierced through Steve's ribcage and delivered venom right to the heart. Pretty sad stuff. Crikey. Snakes on the brainThere was a fun op-ed piece in the NYTimes yesterday about why primates and people have such better vision than other animals. Lynne Isbell proposes: snakes.
And even more fun (albeit a "torture your cousin" kind of fun):
August 05 Why your blog isn't good enough to get noticed
Wired quotes Opinionista (Melissa Lafsky) about why your blog isn't getting you a book deal:
July 27 Ice cream on the way home from the gymI know I do this--go work out and then think, "Hey, now I can treat myself". Here is some thinking about why New Years Resolutions may actually get in your way. Your actions are going to be consistent with your goal if you're focused on the commitment to the goal but you're going to screw up if you focus on monitoring progress towards the goal.
First think how generous you are. Now buy yourself a yacht.Turns out that if you give to charity or do community service, you're more willing to spend money on luxury items. Actually, it's better than that. If you just think about signing up for a soup line or sending money to Darfur, you're more willing to indulge yourself.
Bad side: People who think about donating tend to be less generous when actually asked to donate a little while later. Better to get folks fresh, I guess.
It'll make you go blind. Really.From the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: graphic depictions of violence and sex can temporarily blind people.
"[Subjects] were to view a sequence of several hundred pictures, each of which appeared for one-tenth of a second on a computer monitor, and pick out 'target' images of landscapes or buildings. Sprinkled through the series of emotionally neutral pictures were several that depicted emotionally disturbing sights, such as a knife pressed against a woman's neck or a gruesomely flayed hand. These images upset participants enough to momentarily blind them to the pictures immediately following: when a target image appeared within one-fifth of a second after a disturbing image, subjects' accuracy rates fell from 85 to 71 percent.
"In an as yet unpublished study [the psychologists] substituted erotic pictures for disturbing ones. The result was the same." (From Trey Popp's "Fear, erotic, and temporary blindness" in Yale Alumni Magazine, Nov/Dec 2005, pg 28)
You can find out more here (you are supposed to be able to take the test yourself, but I couldn't figure out where it was): http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu/news/news_rubberneck.htm.
Also, for those psych majors at Yale and Vanderbilt, here are the researchers involved:
Bad tendencies (don't read "Instinct" magazine)Someone got our roommate a subscription of Instinct magazine, which is the most tawdry awful homocentric rag I've seen in a lot time.
The equivalent of the Dear Abby section included some dizzy guy whose new boyfriend had surprised him with a cruise the same weekend as his best friend's wedding. Which she he go to?
Now cruises are expensive and new boyfriends are wonderful, but: Best. Friend. Wedding. It doesn't really matter that weddings aren't necessary fun even when they are our best friends', nor does it really matter that the bride and groom will hardly see you. The fact is that it's a meaningful institution and while you can probably excuse yourself from some weddings, certain ones are requisite.
The awful advice columnist said to go on the cruise. He even made it a cheer for gay rights. Stupid. Insensitive. Irritating.
Worst. Magazine. Ever.
(I. Learned. This. Technique. From. Political. Bloggers.)
I'm not giving you the website address because you shouldn't go there. I've attached a pic so you know what to avoid. The guys in it usually aren't all that hot, btw, so you won't be missing much.
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