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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 UI design and metaphorsI’ve been over at http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/203/ reading some of the stuff Seana Coulson has been assigning to her Cog Sci grad students. This particular blog entry takes the discussion that Coulson, Grady and Oakley published in 1999 on metaphor theory and “blending” and uses it to think about the way we design user experiences. The metaphors in our designs shape how users experience our UIs. Few of our users are going to put up with an interface that “doesn’t make sense”—but if we’re giving them something new, how can they possibly understand how to use it? What convinces them that our UIs make sense? How could anything make sense if you’ve never seen it before and it’s unlike anything else? Well, everything is like something else. Human beings are excellent at taking the alien and making it known. (Those things that are too uncomfortably foreign stay at arm’s length.) Our job as designers is to take some domain a user understands and to get them to see that our interface is kind of like that. Our current metaphors for e-mail are “e-mail is like real mail”; “your e-mail service gives you a little office with an inbox and a trash can”. If we wanted to depart from current metaphors, we’re still going to have to make it like something else users understand. (Like a bulletin board outside your door? Like a soiree where friends drop by?) We try to systematically project the language and imagery of one domain into another, hoping that the user will be able to understand that a lot inferences they take for granted in the source domain will also work in the target domain. Another example you see on various web pages (note the rich metaphor of “the Web is like a book”; we often have more than one metaphor): “Enter this site”. “Enter” is a word used for physically crossing from one type of space into another (like a room). We’re saying here, “You are on the outside, you can come inside”, and more basically, “You move through the Web like you move through the real world. There are ‘sites’ (locations) and you can go into them and go out of them. You can explore and move around just as you do in the real world.” How things go wrong There are several possible breakdowns: · We can choose a “source domain” that users don’t actually know all that well. (Think of what would happen if users didn’t know about postal service and were trying to use our e-mail services.) · We can choose a source domain that doesn’t really map to the target domain. (But note that psycholinguistic results show that people are more likely to see a metaphor where there is greater semantic distance between the elements. That is, they are probably less likely to get confused if you’re saying “This website is like a garden” than if you’re saying “This website is like an Excel spreadsheet.”) · Users can overextend the metaphor and try to do things that do make sense in the source domain, but which don’t in the target domain. (“I better search for a stamp so I can send this e-mail.”) More metaphor fundamentals Design is never perfect. And part of what defines metaphors is that they involve a (temporary) suppression of important information about a particular domain. When we talk about the nation as a ship, we don’t actually mean that the nation has a mast and is sailing on the open seas. When a metaphor works, a bunch of information is ignored—in the example of e-mail is like real mail, you ignore the fact that there aren’t stamps and that a man doesn’t actually come and pick up your e-mail to deliver it to a friend. But if we want to build in an idea of stamps or mailmen, those are right there and we can extend the metaphor. That’s an important thing about metaphors: once we evoke a basic metaphor, we suddenly have primed all sorts of other ones. For example, there are all sorts of places you can enter, but a porn site might get you to think that “Enter the site” has a particularly transgressive boundary to cross. You could easily make the site familiar to physical environments that are like that: an adult bookstore at the edge of town, a sex labyrinth in Palm Springs. (Note that these sorts of obvious designs come off as cheesy and amateurish. The real art to UI design is not being too heavy-handed. Early on practitioners realized that using a single metaphor was awfully clunky and limiting. Note also that I’ve never been to Palm Springs. But I’ve heard stories. Hedge mazes.) Analyzing UIs To analyze a UI, you may want to figure out what metaphors it’s conjuring up and which of them are the most basic. Most metaphors use similarity or analogy, but there are some primary metaphors that come out of actual physical experiences. For example, MORE IS UP comes from actually adding stuff to piles and seeing that there is more and that the pile grows. (See also Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson 1980.) Reference and summary Grady, J., Oakley, T. & Coulson, S. (1999). Conceptual Blending and Metaphor. In R. Gibbs (Ed.) Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Summary of the article itself: Many have thought of ‘conceptual metaphor theory’ and ‘blending theory’ as rivals. They are better seen as complements. CMT looks at generalizations across a broad range of metaphoric expressions; blending looks at particulars of individual examples. Thus CMT looks at long-term memory, while blending looks at on-line processes. “Consequently, metaphor theory will continue to address such questions as which concepts are conventionally associated with each other, how and why such conventional associations arise, and how cross-domain mappings are structured.” Blending may be able to explain how semantic properties of grammatical constructions combine with the lexical semantics of the words used in their instantiations. Tyler’s “to read” list On the role of distinct conceptual blends as experts and novices interact with Web browsers: Maglio, P.P. & Matlock, T. 1998. "Metaphors we surf the web by". Workshop on Personalized and Social Information Space, Stockholm, Sweden. Reptile intimacyMy sister recently learned how to sex crocodiles. You should go read about it on her blog:
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 Some good old-fashioned thematic rolesIn English, you have subject > direct objects > indirect objects > obliques. In Sayula, you have primary objects > secondary objects. How does this work out?
Consider a simple transitive sentence: I tore the book. Here ‘the book’ is the patient. I read the book. Here ‘the book’ is the theme.
Now consider a ditransitive sentence: I gave the book to the boy. ‘The book’ is the theme, and ‘the boy’ is the recipient.
(Please note that this depends upon a fairly conservative and partially confused theory of thematic roles. But think of ‘patients’ as something that undergo change, ‘themes’ as things that are manipulated but not changed. You already know what recipients are.)
In a primary/secondary language, the recipient in the ditransitive gets treated the same way as the theme in the simple transitive. My notes on all of this aren’t terribly clear. It’s worth checking out Matt Dreyer’s 1977 article about primary/secondary and direct/indirect objects.
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. Passives in SayulaSayula doesn’t really do passives other than the word for ‘eclipse’ (lit, ‘it gets swallowed’), which it uses the passive marker is j 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. Boundary blocks voicing, news at 11The way you say, ‘the one who comes’ in Sayula is mimpay, min+p+ay, and since you’ve got an /n/ by a /p/, the /n/à/m/.
Now, by rights, the /p/ should voice—it’s between two voiced sounds, right? But there’s actually a word boundary at work here: mimp#ay, so the /p/ stays a /p/.
(This happens for all the clitics, too. ‘He definitely comes’ = mimpama7 Body part funMesoAmerica is famous for using body parts in fun ways, so you get ‘head’ used for ‘up’ and ‘stomach’ used for ‘in’. Then these (maybe) get grammaticalized as prepositions.
Sayula names body parts with other body parts—they have a bit of an impoverished system. So the same word jo:t, is used for heart and liver. (Maybe Spanish has just taken over?)
My favorites, though:
Finger = ‘nose of the hand’ Elbow = ‘rear end of the arm’
Transitives: MesoAmerica vs. EnglishThere are four types of verbs in Sayula Popoluca:
vi = true intransitives (‘I sleep’)
vt1 = allow agent intransitives, like ‘eat’ in English (‘I eat’ means that I’m doing the eating, not that I’m being eaten)
vt2 = allow patient intransitives, like ‘burn’ in English (‘I burn the paper’ is okay, but if you say ‘I burn’ then you’re talking about the burning happening to you (not that you’re burning something).
vt3 = true transitives
In other words, if vt1 or vt2 occur with a single argument, that argument is understood to be the agent or patient, respectively.
English has relatively few vt1’s and vt2’s, MesoAmerica has a lot. In Sayula, kew7 ('cook') is vi. There is no agent and the patient is obligatory (it's what gets cooked). To have an agent, you have to add a causative morpheme. This shows that you can't just look at the basic meaning to determine what class a verb is. For fun, think about the intransitive English verb, 'dream'. (You can only maybe have a cognate object: 'I dream a dream'.) But in Ojibwe, bwaaN is a vt3. So it's a true transitive there, where you have to have both the agent and the patient. If you just want to say, 'I dreamt', you have to use the antipassive morpheme that itself means 'about something I'm not specifying'. Why'd you put that person there if you put that aspect here?There are a bunch of quasi-auxiliary uses for some verbs, especially verbs of motion and starting/stopping verbs.
n 7oy = ‘go and come back’ min = ‘come’ chu:chiy = ‘start, begin’ k
When these are working in an auxiliary way, person markers don’t go where you think they would.
(1) chú:chiw t Ø aux+aspect person number Ø (subordinate present tense) ‘I started to work.’
(2) t ‘I started working.’
It’s very weird that (2) has the person in the middle, which is why it’s worth paying attention to. The auxiliary carries the aspect, the lexical verb carries the person. [ In Mayan, auxiliaries don't have any explicit aspect, so it isn't as obvious that the things you expect in one place are in two. ] 'Want' is like this in Sayula, too, which is like equi-NP deletion: 'I want to go' = [I want [I go]] but you cross out that interior I. In Sayula: [I want [I go]] crosses off that first I. I'm unclear on whether this may happen with Verb+preposition, too. Speaking of these auxiliaries, Zoque languages don't have a future tense like Sayula. They use 'go' or another auxiliary to do the future. So where did Mixe's funny future comes from? Perhaps Sayula's future wa7n comes from 'want/like', wamp.
How do you find a sentence in Sayula?Sayula sentences were awfully hard to put a cap on. Finding clause boundaries isn’t easy in Sayula (and our texts were all without punctuation to help).
There are some clause-initial clues (very few at the end of the clause):
There's a lot of 7i n 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. |
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