Saturday, May 9, 2009
Year 2, I am through! Get in!!
For those of you who I work with and go to uni with, you will know that I have been fighting over the last month to catch up on enough Japanese to go on to pass the course. I had some help - and the people know who they are and that I am unbelievably grateful - but I managed to teach myself enough Japanese to pass a writing exam at 65% and to pass the speaking as well, despite not being able to go to some of the classes due to illness and work commitments and, well, one holiday as well :S What I want to say is that you can actually do anything if you put the work in and want it bad enough. I made myself do several hours of revision every day for two weeks for the writing exam, and it paid off. I taught myself to write Japanese in two weeks because so much was riding on the result. (I need to pass it to get into my second year of linguistics at Salford) So to anyone who is having exam grief or struggling with coursework or anything at all when you feel like your head is going up against a brick wall, you CAN do it if you put your mind to it. I wish my peers would do that instead of just saying yes but what IS the use of syntax!!
Ideas for a Recursion Tattoo
I don’t want to look like a bar-room brawler but I am up for inking my geekiness into my skin. I wanted a schwa tattoo but my friend Josh reminded me that it would look like a schwa to me, but a normal [e] to everyone else who looked at it from the other way up. Good point Josh. Although I have seen a nice schwa tattoo with diacritics…just google schwa tattoo. I also someone with a glottal stop on their finger. Lame! We don’t like the glottal stop the way we like schwa as Salford.
So I have decided on a recursion tattoo. Mainly because I like recursion. Not because I’ve fixed my thinking on the matter. Yes, alright, chalk one up to the generative people because clearly a linguistic system needs a spot of embedding. But does recursion need to be on sentence level? Chalk one up to the Dan Everett camp. That’s all I am saying until I have completed year 2 syntax and I’ve started to finally get some opinions on the matter.
It’s just going to consist of a slant of about 5 triangles, linked from the bottom right corner of one triangle to the peak of the next. So I suppose it’s a bit syntactic in nature, to say the least :S I knew this would happen. I new right from the start of this semester that that damn syntax would take over my life. Maybe the lady doth protest too much?
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Sonority Sequencing Generalisation, and sun by the sea.
I am back from my holiday in the South of France. The weather was great, and the food great, and the TV…well the TV got me utterly used to French again, and I began to notice things…Late one night I was watching ‘Profilages’, the French equivalent of CSI, and I noticed that in fast speech, speakers of French collapse syllables into one, dropping schwas for example. This is common in many languages, of course. I’ve no idea why but a little light went PING in my head and I thought: hold on…hold on…there’s rules applying here, in a certain order. ‘Ce que’ (suh-kuh) meaning ‘that which’ gets collapsed down into ’ske’ (skuh) - WHICH VIOLATES THE SONORITY SEQUENCING PRINCIPLE. For those of you not in the know, the SSG is a universal constraint which says that a syllable peak will always contain the most sonorant (full of sound, airstream unobstructed) sound in a string, with less sonorous sounds at the peripheries, and the sounds rise to and fall away from this peak in order of increasing or decreasing sonority. Always in order…except that in some languages, English being one of them, you get a more sonorous consonant, in an onset say, than the following consonant in the same onset consonant cluster. So we can have split even though /s/ is more sonorant than the voiceless plosive /p/. So what’s this got to do with French crime shows and fast speech? For me, it shows that sonority is assigned early to string, maybe earlier than something like stress which then allows us to delete out unstressed syllables in fast speech. It also shows me that something like fast-speech phenomena might have battered away at an originally rigid rule until, at the syllable peripheries, a weak-spot in the rule was created which permitted violations of the SSG. I’d like to do more work on this. But it’s so hard to know if you are on the right track or where to find good literature. I’ve emailed my phonetics and phonology teacher, so maybe she can point me in the right direction and I will do some work over the summer. I can keep you all posted.
Friday, April 17, 2009
The dreaded c-command
Greetings unto you linguistics fans. Once again I apologise for the shocking lack of writing in the last couple of weeks. Work is getting busy. Plus I am just not focused. My brain keeps getting taken over by things that I don’t wish to think about but am forced to ponder on. This trouble has all started since we began doing syntax, and I have an impending feeling of doom that I’ll end up doing syntax for a long time yet…Anyway, the c-command is all I can think about at the moment. I even had several dreams about it last night. Yet, I don’t remember anything useful coming out of the dreams, only that I feel like I had to email one of my tutors about it.
For those of you not familiar with the ‘dreaded c-command’, it is a relationship between sister nodes, and their descendents (don’t WORRY I will SHOW you), and the idea is very useful when discussing reflexive pronouns and anaphors. So far so good. I get it. Yahoo.com.
But here is a weird one for you. I want you to think about how we, at least if we say we who speak English, parse our sentences when we are making sense of speech around us. (Forget the fact for now that speech is generally filled with fillers and coughs etc) There are some experiments with eye-movements and garden-path sentences which seem to suggest that humans start at the beginning of a sentence and making best-guesses based on experience built up over time, follow the most likely path through the sentence arriving either at the right interpretation or at a mental wall whereupon we go back and start again to reparse. If this is correct, it shows that the natural way to parse is to work through in a smooth process in a linear fashion. So hold that thought.
Then I learns that the old c-command can be SYMMETRICAL. That is to say that a sister node to the right of a node A can ‘work back’ and have some kind of syntactic influence on an element which ‘comes before’ it in a sentence. Now this is what puzzled me. Why on earth would you stop and go backwards? This does not seem to be how we get through a sentence. But…and this is the good part…what if it’s a loop? Things that are in a c-command relationship could be in somekind of feedback loop. But then what would that loop be for? Now with binding that is clear, it makes sure that the right elements are paired together in order to know which elements refer to other elements to make a sentence grammatical. But anaphora and co make up a TINY portion of the speech-tools that we have at our disposal. So what does the c-command do the rest of the time? If it is a loop…well it needs some kind of channel. Don’t ask me why but something is telling me it’s to do with the verb it’s to do with the verb…at least that’s in simple sentences which are generated by TP {NP/CP} (T) VP - could c-command be responsible for checking processes for valency, gender, number? I don’t know. I could just be talking crap. This is what happens when you’re on your own for 3 weeks with a textbook. It’s dangerous, really.
Friday, April 10, 2009
The Linguistic Month that Was
This month has been a bizarre one indeed. Work has been taxing, I’ve been low on energy, and my creativity has been blocked because I’ve overdosed on studying…undisciplined and unplanned studying at that. I should regulate my time, and restrict the topics that I look it. It’s all getting a bit too much. Additionally, I am making preparations for trying to skip straight up into the 2nd year of university without completing the 2nd half of my part-time first year (that should make sense, and it should not be ambiguous!). In order to get right into the 2nd year, I must pass Japanese. I did appallingly bad on the first two tests, so I do need good marks for the final two tests. I’ll do my best. Plus one of my best friends has promised me a moleskin notebook of choice if I pass the module, so surely it’s worth the effort! Anyway, I’ll quickly inform you what I’ve been reading and thinking about, but then I may disappear again for a week or two - as I said, I’m feeling a little mentally fatigued. Well, syntax is slowly but surely eroding my life away. It’s been on my mind a lot [pardon the pun, I suppose it's on everyone's minds] and has therefore formed the focus of my study. I’ve been working on ambiguous sentences and trying to parse them up for all possible interpretations. I’ve found a great programme where you can enter a bracketed string and it spits out a syntax tree [just google 'ironcreek syntax' and you'll find it]. The programme I’ve been using has actually taught me how to bracket properly rather than draw the trees but apparantly bracketing is harder so I am glad I have got the hang of it. I can draw the trees just fine now though. I wrote the PSRs in my syntax notebook that I carry with me, so I can draw trees wherever I happen to be…preferably when I am chilling out in Starbucks on a day off. I’ve also been finishing ‘the Language Instinct’ by Stephen Pinker, which is heavily focussed on syntax and children and language. It also has a couple of helpful paragraphs on ambiguity. I’d really recommend that anyone who wants to know about the psychology of language and the nuts and bolts of syntax should read him…he’s as important as Chomsky…and he is accessible, too. My friend who promised me the notebook also treated me to some books when I was down to see her in London. We have Breal’s ‘Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning’ and we have A J Ayer’s ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ - god knows when I’ll find the energy and time to get through them, though I am sure those books will come in handy for all my future studies. Anyway, soon I am in France for a week where I will be able to read and create. Finally, I am pleased to report that I’ve looked over my coming phonetics and phonology coursework and it is way easier than the first and I can’t believe that we’ve been set something so simple. I’ll get it out of the way this week, I think. So, if anyone has any comments or questions, please get in touch. Sorry that I haven’t written much - I promise that I shall be back on form soon.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
This morning I have been mostly thinking about CPs
Well, it has finally happened. We’re a couple of weeks into the syntax module and I am utterly addicted. There’s a giant tree-structure creeping along my wall where I’ve run out of space on my blackboard and I’ve had to run onto a bit of paper which I’ve stuck above it. Who’d have thought I’d fall in love with syntax. It’s complicated, you can’t take your eye off the tree [ball], it has the potential to get rather deep and abstract, and it seems to contain a lot of barmy jargon…ok, ok, in hindsight I should have known that I’d love it.
Syntax to me seems to be the one bit of linguistics where we can can start working our way backwords and deeper until we can possibly get to something fundamental at work in the brain, something specific to us, something very human and very unique for language. [And no, we're not talking about language modules here...I am NOT well-read enough to be going up against Noam and co...not sure that I would, actually...I like rules!] So in a way, syntax seems to come to me more easily that phonology would. But in both modules I suppose we really are just at a basic level and so it will be interesting to see how I will get on with both subjects and which one I’ll take more of an interest in for the future. In any case, I’ll be taking syntactic theory and phonological theory next year. But, yes, I think syntax offers us just another way of explaining how we look at the world. Since I started looking at syntax, I am now seeing connections and hierarchies everywhere. So from a philosophical point of view, do we have syntax because that is what we think the world is like so we assume that language must behave the same as, say, a beehive or a corporation or a village or a biological family? Or does our understanding of the world arise because we’ve got syntax buried deep from fairly early on in our brains and that then impinges on how we interpret the modern world…
Anyway, the whole reason why I have been mostly thinking about syntax: ambiguity and complementiser phrases. A CP or complementiser phrase is a phrase which, in my mind, is best explained by saying it is ‘down a level’ from the previous phrase. [This is a really clumsy explanation but as I've told my tutor this morning, I just don't have the right words yet to show what I am thinking.]
So we can have a declarative sentence like
“Laura called the woman.” - that’s all on ‘one level’ for me.
But a complementiser phrase does some embedding work…so let’s make it a relative clause.
“Laura called the woman that we met last week.”
[Laura called the woman [that we met last week.]]
But we can have a complementiser phrase which does not need, in English, to contain complementisers…that means we can say:
“Laura called the woman we met last week.”
But is the complementiser there, or not there? It’s not phonologically realised…but something still performs the act of embedding. So we can ’say’ something without saying it. That must make language a special system. Houses must have the right number of bricks else they fall down [but in Jenga if you take out the right brick, the shape is preserved] ???
I don’t know what to think. But it seems that language constructs sometimes with implied or inferred bricks, and the house still stands. Sentence Jenga!
Friday, March 27, 2009
Behind the Screen / In front of the Screen
This week, I’ve been finishing off reading ‘The Stuff of Thought’ by Steven Pinker. In it, he discusses how we’ve got, effectively, our understanding of time, space, and objects encoded in the words and metaphors that we use to talk about things - for example that time is viewed as stretching out in front of us, and it is linear, and that we can cut the edge off a ribbon linguistically, but geometrically, this feat would be impossible. And it explains why something is ‘under’water when it is technically surrounded by water. Some liquids and solid things like earth are viewed chiefly from the point of view of the large surface area, so if you are underwater, what we are really saying is that you are under the surface of the water…Anyway, this reminded me of the old debate that the way we think can be encoded in our language…and last night I was provided with a lovely gem by my French housemate which reminded me of that also. I was correcting his coursework, and the lad suffers terribly with trying to get the right prepositions when he is writing English.
Me: “It’s not ‘behind the screen’. It’s ‘in front of the screen’. You sit in front of the screen.
Housemate: “In French, we can say ‘behind the screen’, you are behind it, it’s like you are hiding from the world behind the screen. Like ‘you spend your whole life behind the screen’.
Me: And ’screen’, for you, do you think then it’s more in the sense of an old-screen that you dress behind?
Housemate: Maybe, yeah.
So what if we say that the semantics of the word ’screen’ for the French, means principally that a screen has to conceal something or someone, and that even though ’screen’ now points to a smaller object with a difficult function, a complete semantic shift is not yet complete, and the content of the word restricts which prepositions can be used with it? Let’s keep our ears open and see if we can find examples from other languages.
Me: “It’s not ‘behind the screen’. It’s ‘in front of the screen’. You sit in front of the screen.
Housemate: “In French, we can say ‘behind the screen’, you are behind it, it’s like you are hiding from the world behind the screen. Like ‘you spend your whole life behind the screen’.
Me: And ’screen’, for you, do you think then it’s more in the sense of an old-screen that you dress behind?
Housemate: Maybe, yeah.
So what if we say that the semantics of the word ’screen’ for the French, means principally that a screen has to conceal something or someone, and that even though ’screen’ now points to a smaller object with a difficult function, a complete semantic shift is not yet complete, and the content of the word restricts which prepositions can be used with it? Let’s keep our ears open and see if we can find examples from other languages.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Short Circuit - We need input. Or wouldn’t we like to be peppers, too?
At the moment, I am finding things a bit tough. I’m reading “On Language” by Noam Chomksy, and I am reading “The Stuff of Thought” by Steven Pinker. And on top of that, I can’t stop thinking where language comes from. And both have these men have thrown more than just their oar into the debate. I don’t know where best to align myself. I’m not even sure if it’s science or philsophy. We’re not computers, but there are things that computers do and things that we probably do which are extremely similar. Some points scored for compuational linguistics. But a computer will never be able to make sense of the world in the way that we do, and they can’t convincingly acquire language - they just don’t have the internal mental deep-structures to do what we do. But I know that if we want to talk about language, we have to do it in an interesting way which people can understand. Which is why I would like you all, if you were born (!), to cast your mind back to 1986, when SHORT CIRCUIT was released. Short Circuit’s about a robot (Number 5) who gets hit by lightening, and develops language, and intelligence. If you ask anyone about the movie, they will usually say that the robot became intelligent, or ALIVE in some way - what they never mention is that he developped LANGUAGE, human language, and therefore he was able to experience and describe the world as we might do.
Number 5 came off the production line with a limited and rigid programme language inside himself. His ‘bosses’ could tell him which direction to move him, what to do, even speak instructions to him aloud - but as we know, these instructions have no deep meaning. There’d be something akin to a one-to-one correspondence between each utterance and the required action. “Move forwards” would be “move = motion” and “forwards = in the direction of forwards” - and you can’t say there’d be a syntax there. “Forwards move” would be the same thing for the robot. And in the scene where the robots have to make drinks, they are told what they have to do, and the robots speak as well, but what’s to say that all of those responses are not preprogrammed? Number 5 had a limited and rigid and very small language system - but luckily, that was all that he needed to get started…Number 5 shows us what I believe, which is that we use language as a tool to probe and make sense of the physical world around us. When the main character Stephanie discovers the robot hiding in her ’snack shack’, she thinks he is from outer space. She talks to him very simply, but discovers that he does know some words such as ‘forwards’, and is so able to communicate with him at a rudimentary level. But we must remember, the robot has already been struck by lightening, and is now ‘acquiring’ whatever marks him out as alive…
Number 5’s linguistic development is fast. And not that different to what kids do. Imitation only forms a tiny part of his learning process. He acquires his language from the environment around him, from watching the TV all night, scanning all the books in the house, and speaking with Stephanie. That’s not to say he ‘learns’ or ‘memorises’ the language [though I think the suggestion in the film is that he does] but he is exposed to it and immersed in it, and I think he is able to set his internal parameters to expand on the set of rules about language that he already possesses. Language ‘grows’ in his mind [if we assume he has one], as Chomsky once said.
What I like about this film is the philosophical ramification of what happens to Number 5. Wittgenstein said that we know pain when we learn the word pain, or something similar. Naming an abstract concept, or putting that name to the concept in the case of someone not coining a word, is a profound and sometimes emotional experience. I will never forget the scene in this film where Number 5 realises what it means ‘to be dead’ and that you cannot ‘reassemble’ people and living creatures. The film also shows us that we humans are able to make cognitive leaps that no other species can. Not only can we say “this string of sounds points to this woman and only this woman ‘Stephanie’ in the world”, but we can say “Stephanie is beautiful” or should that be “beautiful Stephanie”. And what thing in the world does beauty indicate? We can give 1000 ostensive examples, but we cannot encapsulate in a simple definition what it is, or give a concrete object in the world to which it refers.
So please, go and watch this film, and think about what I have mentioned. And then think on the really amazing things that we are able to do.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
It’s all Swahili to me
Well the coursework deadline for our Morphology coursework was yesterday, so I am assuming I am safe in talking about the assignment. The folks who I imagine haven’t done the works are the ones that wouldn’t go reading a blog on linguistics, so I don’t think we’ve got a problem. Our assignment was to work on sentences from a Congo-based dialect which had been paired with their English equivalents, and we had to break them down into morphemes and work out which meanings went with each morphemes. We then had to write down some questions that we would ask our ‘language consultants’ in order to answer some questions about Swahili that were left hanging because the sample didn’t contain enough information for us to make conclusions. I really enjoyed this assignment. The first thing I did was grab a load of graph paper and a pencil and systematically separate the strings of letters into the chunks that contain these meanings. Then I went through crossing them off, working out the meanings. It’s like Sudoku, but with letters instead of numbers, and there’s actually a point to the task. But then I bet Sudoku lovers would say that about some of the things that us linguists get up to!! Anyway, I am pretty sure that I’ve managed to isolate the right number of morphemes, because I took time on this task. I took to missing out one or two when I was in class, but I was rushing because I was so enthusiastic. I found out some interesting things about Swahili is well, that is to say it is an agglutinative language, with infixes that I think can get into the verb stem. There’s no difference between he, she and it. There seems to be some kind of case system. I have definitely passed it, and that’s what I need. That part of the course was far too short though. The lecturer only did 4 weeks on morphology and one of those weeks he was away, still, it’s only an introduction. The good stuff is coming with the syntax that we are doing now…
