One Direction: Down

As mentioned in another post, one of the classes I teach at Konan is called Kiso-enshu I, which roughly translates as Introductory Seminar, or so I'm told. There is no prescribed curriculum or syllabus for this course: it is intended an introduction to academic studies for incoming students of English, who until just a few weeks ago were still in high school.

The gap year is still alien to most Japanese students, more's the pity.

In the absence of a fixed curriculum, I am free to do "pretty much what [I] like". Since the intersection of [the set of activities covered by this expression] and [the set of legitimate and appropriate things to do with a class of slightly post-adolescent teenagers] includes listening to and talking about English songs—and not much else—that is what we are doing.

Beginning next week, the course will introduce students to singer-songwriters that, but for this course, they would never, ever, listen to: Harry Chapin, Ralph McTell, Joni Mitchell, Don McLean, and Leonard Cohen are up there, for starters. They may not like it, but I am a man on a mission. And missionaries—at least in the popular Victorian stereotype—need to find out and understand what kinds of hideous alien gods their charges are currently in thrall to. It's important to have a base-line reference. So last week I asked my students to fill in a questionnaire about their favourite English-speaking bands.

A small, but marginally significant group among those who expressed a preference wrote 1D (= One Direction). I had heard of this group, of course—my 5 year-old nephew is quite a fan, but until yesterday, when I started to prepare for today's class, I had no idea—really n o  i d e a—how bad, how jaw-droppingly, bletheringly, numbingly awful it could be. It is sometimes said of really bad art that "it's so bad, it's great", but this doesn't apply to 1D: the progression from awful through excruciating to hysterically revolting is completely linear (as their name suggests). What is most striking in the one song I assigned myself and transcribed below is not simply the complete absence of any musical or lyrical talent, considered separately: it is the almost surreal lack of correspondence between natural English prosody and musical metre that is so wretched-making. If the proverbial monkey were given a pen and asked to put stress on random syllables in each line, s/he could not have produced more unnatural-sounding English or more forced metre. This is not mere doggerel, it is much, much worse than that: indeed, for the writer of this song, doggerel must be an aspirational goal, rather than a pitfall to be avoided.

As evidence I offer the following specimens. Specimen 1 and 2 present two transcripts of the song What makes you beautiful: Specimen 1 contains only the syllables in each line that receive strong stress as sung by 1D; Specimen 2 contains the syllables that should receive stress if the song were read as a rhyming text. For purposes of confirmation only, a link to the VEVO video is embedded below.

Be warned that this may be injurious to your health: it is certainly not pretty.

Specimen 1.

(inse)cure,  for
heads walk do-o-r
(make-)up, up, way are en-ou-ou-gh
Every else room, you
light world body
you hair over
smile ground, hard
don't kno-o-ow, don't know you're beautiful
If you I, understand want  des(perately),
looking can't believe
kn-o-o-ow, You don't know you're beautiful,  
That's
on, wrong,
right, it, song
why, shy, away, look, eye eye eyes...

Specimen 2. Most egregious forms highlighted

You're insecure, Don't know what for,
You're turning heads when you walk through the door,
Don't need make-up, To cover up, 
Being the way that you are is enough

Everyone else in the room can see it, Everyone else but you:
Baby, you light up my world like no-body else
The way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed,
But when you smile at the ground it ain't hard to tell, You don't know, Oh, oh,

You don't know you're beautiful,
If only you saw what I can see,
You'd understand why I want you so desperately,
Right now I'm looking at you and I can't believe,
You don't know,
Oh, oh, You don't know you're beautiful,
Oh, oh, That's what makes you beautiful.

So come on,
You got it wrong,
To prove I'm right, I put it in a song,
I don't know why you're being shy,
And turn away when I look into your eyes




This is not a question of vocabulary choice. As Something shows, one can make a song out of simple words that still manages to read almost exactly as well as it is sung. All you need is...love talent, something that these boyos and their aesthetically bereft team just haven't got.

Jesus wept.

Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me
I don't want to leave her now
You know I believe and how

Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don't no other lover
Something in her style that shows me
I don't want to leave her now
You know I believe and how

You're asking me will my love grow
I don't know, I don't know
You stick around now, it may show
I don't know, I don't know

Something in the way she knows
And all I have to do is think of her
Something in the things she shows me
I don't want to leave her now
You know I believe and how

Minimalism and Semantic Syntax: Interpreting Multifunctionality in Vietnamese

Full Paper Here

Talk presented in Hanoi, May 11-12, 2013

Original Abstract
This talk is concerned with a deceptively simple question: where does sentence meaning come from? Within generative grammar, at least since the demise of Generative Semantics, the received view has been that the meaning of a sentence is exhaustively a function of the lexical elements of which it is comprised (setting aside the effects of constituency and scope). This is made explicit in the Projection Principle (Chomsky 1981), which understands syntax as a "projection of lexical properties". In subsequent Minimalist approaches (Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2000), this restriction is tightened up even further by the requirement that syntactic computations operate exclusively with the lexical items introduced in the initial array (numeration): no node labels or extraneous symbols (e.g., theta-roles, indices, movement traces, levels of representation) which might contribute to sentence meaning. This does not, of course, exclude reference to abstract formal features—indeed, these are crucial to most Minimalist analyses—but it requires that such features (e.g., EPP features) are ultimately drawn from the lexicon: they are themselves lexical entries, alongside contentful, arbitrary lexical items. Whatever the theoretical advantages of this approach for delivering an extremely spare Minimalist syntax, it should be clear that it massively increases lexical complexity, leading to a multiplicity of different abstract features attaching to what are, intuitively speaking, the same lexical items. Grammatical theory is a ‘zero-sum game’: if the syntax does little or no semantic work, the burden necessarily falls on lexical specification.

In the case of languages with rich inflectional paradigms and/or an extensive inventory of phonetically-differentiated functional categories, this 'poor syntax—rich lexicon' approach makes some sense, since subtle differences in feature specification are reflected in different pronunciations that must in any case be lexically listed; e.g., English present perfect has been vs. preterite was; wh-interrogative who vs. indefinite anyone; locative vs. expletive there; nominative she vs. accusative her. However, for Vietnamese and other isolating languages, the desirability of a strict lexicalist approach is much less evident. In contrast to inflectional languages, Vietnamese does not appear to differentiate subtle meaning contrasts in the lexicon: instead, it disposes of a set of radically-underspecified 'multifunctional' items, whose semantics are determined in part—and in some instances exhaustively—by their position in phrase-structure. A clear example of this multifunctionality is offered by the modal auxiliary được (also phải), which is variously interpreted as a deontic, epistemic or abilitative modal—even as a non-modal, aspectual, particle—in different structural positions, This is illustrated in (0); see Duffield (1999), Phan & Duffield (in prep.)

0. a. Ông Quang được mua cái nhà.
        prn Q. can buy cl house
        ‘Quang was allowed to buy a house.’

    b. Ông Quang mua được cái nhà.
        prn Q. buy can cl house
        ‘Quang has bought (was able to buy) a house.’

    c. Ông Quang mua cái nhà được.
         prn Q. buy cls house can
         ‘Quang is able to buy a house/Quang may possibly buy a house.’

Other examples will be discussed directly. This multifunctionality suggests a radically different, though equally austere, conception of Minimalism: Minimalist Lexicalism (see also Marantz 2005, Borer 2007). The corollary of this, of course, is Semantic Syntax: meaning inheres in, and is read off of, syntactic representations. In this talk, then, I elaborate an alternative Minimalist thesis: I argue that it is elucidating to introduce a limited amount of meaning into syntax, maintaining that this can be done without resurrecting Generative Semantics.