No simple exercise

Identify the clauses in the following paragraph (from Chapter 1) of Dickens' Bleak House: for each clause, underline the subject and the place the predicate phrase in square brackets:

'London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.'

A thankless exercise. Which is, no doubt, why some people--those naive souls who believe in the goal of observational adequacy--tend to give up on syntactic theory.

Joiner-inner? Taker-onner? *Faller-downer

I am looking for published discussion or analysis of the following phenomenon, which—for want of a better term—might be labeled iterative -er reduplication. (Reduplication is formally iterative, by definition: I'm referring here to its interpretation)

In regular V-N single stem cases -er is a nominalising affix that creates an N meaning person or thing involved in the event, activity or situation denoted by the verb that serves as the stem. Broader than "agent", simple -er can be applied to verbs of all lexical aspects (sleeper, waiter, reader, builder, winner, undergoer, remainer; computer, counter, cooker (UK).

However, when newly applied to particle verbs/phrasal verbs (that is to say, setting aside already lexicalized items such as 'passers by, runners up, hangers on'), -er is found on both the verb-stem and the following particle, as in "joiner-inner" (this appears in the screenplay of An Education, which my literature colleague was reading last week, and which sparked my curiosity).

For these cases, if my intuitions are correct, a much narrower set of restrictions applies:

(i) both parts of the verb must be affixed:

e.g., 'He's always putting off dental appointments à He's a great putter-offer (of appointments) [ cf. *putter-off, ??put-offer]; She’s always making up stories à She’s a maker-upper [?maker-up, make-upper]; A skilled putter-onner of make-up; They fix up old houses à They are fixer-uppers.

(ii) only the particle can be pluralized: picker-uppers, putter-offer, but *pickers-up, *pickers-uppers, *putters-off

(iii) the phrasal verb must be inherently transitive (even if the object is not expressed)

e.g., ‘He picks up litter everywhere he finds it’ à He’s a great picker-upper (of litter). She’s good at settling people down à She’s a good settler-downer’. Cf. He sleeps in every morning à *He’s a sleeper-inner, *a frequent nodder-offer. A smooth taker-offer is * if referring to planes, ok if referring to cosmetic surgeons (e.g., a taker-offer of unwanted tattoos), *faller-downer, *walker-outer (on relationships). These things come up frequently *à these things are frequent comer-uppers. Simple verbs are not subject to this restriction: compare sleeper, walker, taker, sitter, all-comers…

(iv), related to (iii), the subject must be clearly agentive. E.g., Take in = to house à a taker-inner of stray cats vs. take in = apprehend *à a easy taker-inner of information.

(v) in contrast to simple –er cases, double –er always has an iterative interpretation, referring to repeated action. See all of the above examples. Also ‘He is a great maker-upper (of interesting stories), cf. #on that occasion he was a great maker-upper.

(vi) restricted to a subset of (monosyllablic) particles: up, in, off, down; bi-syllabic particles don’t seem to work: *looker-intoer (= investigator), ??taker-overer (of companies).

If these intuitions are more generally shared, when and how are the constraints acquired? Please post a comment if you know of relevant literature.

Shake Can Well (Link)

Last month, I gave a talk at CamCos3, the text of which is now posted on LingBuzz. It was the first time I have ever given a theoretical talk in Cambridge, let alone an invited one. And by happy coincidence, this year marks the 30th anniversary of my graduation from Trinity Hall. All in all, a very pleasant and interesting homecoming.







http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002119

Names and Faces, and Handedness (Preliminary Results)

Who would've guessed...? After years of not getting round to it, then (literally) months of preparation, I've been able over the past few weeks to run a new Language and Cognition experiment. Here are some preliminary results...

The study I've set up investigates possible correlations in "perceptual narrowing", comparing participants' ability to discriminate native vs. non-native phonemic contrasts with their ability to discriminate native vs. non-native Japanese vs. Caucasian faces (for anyone interested, there's some background information on my website). The experiment consists of two forced-choice discrimination tasks—XAB/ABX, for faces and sounds, respectively—plus a lexical familiarity pretest (to test whether participants are familiar with all of the English words carrying the phonemic contrasts).

Participants

To date, 43 Japanese undergraduate students have taken part in the first run of the experiment. The results below are based on 40 participants (including 4 left-handers: see below). Two participants, whose accuracy scores fell below two standard deviations from the overall mean, were dropped from the analysis. One other participant (subject #3), who reported spending her early childhood in the US, was also excluded from the present analysis.

Results—Faces

Apriori, one might have expected that (for Japanese participants) Japanese faces would be easier to discriminate than Caucasian faces. Right? Except, that's not what the data suggest (at first blush). See Figures 1 and 2. As these figures show, the Japanese faces elicit somewhat less accurate and slower responses, though it remains to be seen whether the differences are statistically reliable. (Of course, this might not be a fatal problem: it could just be that the 30 pairs of Western faces are just easier for contingent reasons. It depends on how the Western participants judge the two sets, and I won't find this out until April. In any case,  I'm mainly interested in probing cross-modal correlations within-subjects, so even if the overall results don't turn out quite as expected, there may still be interesting within subject correlations.

Figure 1. Overall, Asian faces are hardest to discriminate (though the effect may not be robust)...

Figure 2...and Japanese participants take longer to judge Japanese faces than Caucasian ones (overall).

At this point in the analysis, the interesting quirks come when one looks more closely. Among the other independent and control variables, besides NATIVENESS, I manipulated ISI—time between the offset of the target face and presentation of the two possible matches (500 vs. 1000ms), Presentation Time of the target face (100 vs. 200) msecs, and Orientation—whether the faces are presented upright or inverted (upside-down). I also recorded the between-subjects factor of Handedness, just because I have a hunch about this...

Taking Orientation first, Figure 3 shows that this matters a lot: as predicted, in every condition, upright faces are easier to identify than the same faces presented upside-down.  No surprise here. What is surprising, though, is that the inversion effect is probably only significant for Asian faces (in other words, for native faces!). Curiously, inverted Caucasian faces are not much harder to discriminate than when presented upright.

Figure 3. Interactions between Nativeness and Inversion. The chart here shows that—as expected—upright faces are easier to discriminate than inverted ones. No surprise here. What is surprising, though, is that the inversion effect is probably only significant for Asian faces (in other words, for native faces)

I haven't even started the interpretive stats yet, so some of these initial results may turn out to be spurious, but it looks like all of these factors interact in interesting ways. Perhaps most surprisingly, handedness seems to interact with the other variables in an interesting way: left-handers are better than right-handers overall—much better in certain conditions—but also appreciably worse in others. See Figures 4 and 5 below. (Less surprising was the apparently significant main effect of Orientation, though it is still curious that this effect is larger for left-handers than right-handers.)

Figure 4. As might have been predicted, it's harder—for everyone—to discriminate faces overall when they are upside down (INV) than the right way up. That's what we see in Figure 3. What is less expected are the sub-patterns revealed in Figure 4: left-handers seem to show a huge effect of orientation for native (Japanese) faces, but not for non-native (Caucasian) ones; right-handers, by contrast, are better overall at discriminating non-native faces, but relatively poor at discriminating native ones.

Figure 5. Shorter ISI results in greater accuracy, but only for native faces (for left-handers) and for non-native faces for (right-handers). Go figure!

Which is all very weird, until I looked again and realized that there were only 4 left-handed subjects in the set (42). So it may really be a freak result. More anon.

 Sounds 

As for the sounds, these have worked out almost exactly as predicted. Figures 6 and 7 shows the accuracy scores and response latencies to trials involving minimal phonemic contrasts in English and Japanese, embedded in real lexical items. The blue bars show the discriminability of the control items: /t/ vs. /d/, phonemic contrasts common to both languages. The red bars show participants' performance on test items, i.e. contrasts that are not shared by both languages: /l/ vs. /r/ in the English trials, phonemically short vs. long segments in the case of the Japanese trials. Within the test items, 'more difficult' English contrasts are those where the critical phoneme is non-initial in the syllable (e.g. prays/plays), in contrast to the more perceptible syllable-initial contrasts (low/row); for the Japanese items, differences in vowel length were predicted to be harder to detect than consonantal length contrasts.

Figures 6 and 7 clearly suggest main effects of LANGUAGE (English vs. Japanese) and TRIAL TYPE (Control vs. Test), also—possibly—a small main effect of ITEM DIFFICULTY, as well as a reliable interaction between language and trial type, as reflected in both dependent measures: the Japanese participants in the study are significantly less accurate and slower in correctly discriminating non-native phonemic contrasts—i.e., l vs. r—than in discriminating native ones (67% vs. 98%). Notice that there is no appreciable difference in the responses to English and Japanese control items (both >95%).

Figure 6. Sounds—Accuracy across Conditions

Figure 7. Sounds—RT across conditions

The sounds experiment also manipulated ISI, in this case, the delay between presentation of the second alternative sound and the target sound (either 2250 or 3250 msecs). Ceteris paribus, longer ISIs should increase task difficulty. However, as Figures 8 and 9 show, increasing ISI appears to have had no significant effect on overall accuracy, though there was a (possibly significant) increase in response latency in the English/Test Conditions. 

Figure 9. Sounds. Effects of ISI on response latency (Note that the RTs here are based only on correct responses.)

Kanji, how I loathe thee!

Events of the last few weeks have led me to give some consideration to Japanese Kanji, and its moraic sidekicks, Katakana and Hiragana. For what it's worth: here's my dystopic theory of the Japanese writing systems.
 
The purpose of Kanji is: 

• (i) to prevent (almost) anyone who has not been through six years of elementary education from learning the language, by blocking all feedback from written signs and messages; 
• (ii) to waste children's time by focusing their attention on the brushstrokes of arbitrary symbols , when they could be learning content; 
• (iii) to cause untold domestic and other friction between those who have already learned a few kanji, and those who are just starting out...

The contrasting purpose of katakana is: 

• (i) to stymie the best efforts of Japanese speakers trying to learn English, by neutralizing crucial distinctions (not just light/right but also lunch/ranch), inserting superfluous syllables, and generating atrocious puns; 
• (ii) to offend against the (a)esthetic sensibilities of almost everyone (except, perhaps, those who liked thin, angular cars like the Triumph TR7, or late-70s Ford Escort).

And then there's hiragana, whose purpose is much less clear, unless it be:

• (i) to teach Japanese linguistics students about functional categories; 
• (ii) indicate at a distance where one can buy cigarettes (by a curious quirk of history *tobacco* is invariably written in hiragana, rather than the expected katakana.) 

These would seem to be rather petty uses for a perfectly serviceable, almost attractive syllabary.
End of rant. 

Which is not to pretend that English orthography is perfect. Vietnamese is nice, though.

Der Schauende (cross-posting)

This will not be news to those of you who had a decent mathematical education, but it was to me. After 51 years, thanks to my son Sean's science homework, I've just learned that there is a difference between precision and accuracy. Really, I had no idea...

(Accuracy, it seems, is only for realists: but even relativists can be—relatively—precise.)

Now for some catch-up.

(Same series, though mine is an earlier edition)

A few months ago, I picked off the shelf a copy of Rilke's 'Der augewählten Gedichte, anderer Teil. (I don't have the erster Teil, unfortunately). This undated Insel Verlag edition was published in Leipzig, either just before or during the War, judging from the cover, and must have belonged to my uncle Kenneth (erstwhile Professor of German at Keele University), as do all of the few decent German books I now possess—including an early copy of Hermann Paul's Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, the translation of which will be on my to-do list, probably for ever. It won't happen today, that's for sure: I taught four 90-minute classes virtually back to back, without lunch, came home and cooked dinner, helped to bathe and put the kids in bed...

...Anyway—und dann und wann ein weißer Elephant' (which isn't in this collection, but still careers around my head at least once a week)—I was at my reading of 'Der Schauende' some months ago, and thought: Wow (or some such hint at the ineffable).

What a brilliant piece.

...Wie ist das klein, womit wir ringen
Was mit uns ringt, wie ist das groß:
ließen wir, ähnlicher den Dingen,
uns so vom großen Sturm bezwingen — 
wir würden weit und namenlos.

Was wir besiegen, ist das Kleine
und der Erfolg selbst macht uns klein...

Stunning, really. Disheartening, too: after hearing these too perfect lines, writing anything—saying anything—seems only to add more junk to an already overflowing landfill.

And so I looked on YouTube for a competent rendering of the poem, and found something quite dreadful, an object lesson in how not to read anything (not even a grocery list), in how a bad performance can utterly ruin even the finest lines.

But then I looked again today
And found the poem resurrect
by Oskar Werner, a man whose name,
though t'is renowned, I never knew
Till now — and more's the shame.

[with apologies to Heine]

YouTube taketh away, but giveth, too
...und dann und wann: ein Wunder — Click to play

Was wir besiegen, ist das Kleine
und der Erfolg selbst macht uns klein...

Postscript 10/25: This evening, browsing my subscriptions on Youtube, I came across this talk by Nigel Fabb (one of the other Nigel linguists) on verse design and verse delivery, focussing on Dylan Thomas' reading of his own and other's poetry. Fascinating material, interesting ideas:

Linguistics of Vietnamese

After some delay, I am pleased to have this in my hands at last. Thanks to Daniel Hole and Elisabeth Löbel, and the staff at Mouton for doing such an excellent job. If you are interested in Vietnamese grammar, please have your library order this!


A preprint version of the article is available here:

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.

Snippet

Reading though another blog, I came across this gem. (For the benefit of non-native readers, this is perfectly acceptable, I think). What I believe it shows is that syntactic selection—end up takes a gerundive complement—outranks semantic coherence (statives should not usually be imperfective, end up normally implies some type of accomplishment or achievement.)

The guy sounded like a native speaker, and the woman sounded American, and she ended up being someone I haven't seen in a few years.

Curiously, the other more plausible paraphrases are less acceptable:

#...she ended up to be someone I haven't seen in a few years.

#...it ended up that she was someone I haven't seen in a few years.

Understanding Language Acquisition

Lough Neagh, near Bushmills

It has been a long, uneven process. It has taken me twenty years to distill everything I have observed about language acquisition into one word, rather, one acronym.

Gialil  (Gall, without the auxiliaries)

Grammar is Acquired. Language is Learned.

Seo dhuit é. どうぞ


In the unlikely event that this is true—stranger things have happened—the rest of the (so-called) language acquisition literature is an untidy footnote to this simple observation. And the field needs a new label.

I should probably leave it there, in the interests of brevity, were it not that brevity and I have rarely shared any deep interests, or modi operandi: she cuts too many corners, leaves so many stones unturned. We're not even on first-name terms. (She might be called Amy or Eve; Anastasia or Evangeline would be a cruel irony). Hence, some elaboration is necessary, or—if not entirely necessary—forthcoming regardless...

There is only one problem with claiming that grammar is acquired. That problem is not that it annoys anti-nativists, since straw men are pretty unrufflable, at least figuratively speaking; even if they weren't—straw men, or unmoved by ruffling, take your pick—I would cheerfully stoop to the challenge. Everyone with enough intelligence to understand the question is a nativist to some extent: not even the most dyed-in-the-wool emergentist—an unfortunately inapt metaphor—believes that the smartest sheep can learn syntax. No, the problem is that after 20 years, I have less idea than ever what grammar is. I know what a grammar is, of course; three years in Japan have not robbed me of that fine distinction. Grammar, on the other hand, may be more like the 'present King of France'; if Minimalists are right, it's just as bald. Thus, a better formulation might be: 'Grammar [if such a thing exists] is acquired.' Though, it must be admitted, Gisateialil hardly rolls of the tongue with the same...languid motility.

Then there's the problem of language, or rather Language (the concept, not the journal). Chomsky's surely correct—merely confidently rehearsed?—assertion of the stupendous incoherence of notions like 'the English Language', 'French Grammar', etc should  have persuaded language teachers and other language professionals, including SLA researchers, to jack it in or sling their hook, or otherwise extricate themselves from the Querk of confusion and despond that is Language, years ago. That they remain unpersuaded—and/or, in the field—may be due to the fact that: (i), most said language professionals have never read Chomsky on E-language; (ii), have, but don't believe him—which in this instance is like not believing in man-made climate change; or (iii), which is the case of many of my colleagues, believe the assertion, but think it doesn't apply to them: 'E-language is incoherent alright, but we are studying Interlanguage/we are teaching TOiEC'. Hm. Unlike the participants in their experiments, who wouldn't pay a brass farthing to acquire a such a coherent theoretical construct, but who fork out millions of yen and sundry other currency units to learn "English". (I shouldn't complain perhaps, since it is the incoherence, and unattainability of language, that guarantees me my job and lets me send my bilingual children to international schools. Let incoherence prevail!)

The point of all this is that Language is not learned or taught; but aspects of languages—the 90% we care about—are learned, and require constant reinforcement to reach convergence. In spite of appearances, 'learn English' is not an accomplishment predicate, nor is it an achievement: at best, it is an activity, though usually not a very active one: a dynamic state (of mind) possibly... If one cannot even classify the associated predicate, the chances of adequately grasping the concept are remote. And grasping the concept of language would seem to be necessary condition for learning it. So, perhaps a better way to express this would be: 'some aspects of language are partially internalized through experience.'

Which brings us to:

Gisateialil, Saolapite.

Much better, I don't think. Should have listened to brevity. Or to Robert Benchley:

'Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.'

It's not my problem (with Chomsky)

(For linguists only, probably, this one)

 

First, we had Humboldt’s Problem, then Plato’s, then Descarte’s, then Broca’s. Along the way, there was Orwell’s Problem. Now we have Darwin’s Problem.

I have been a card-carrying generativist for over twenty years—though I have to confess that I stopped paying the (figurative) dues somewhere around 1998—and remain reasonably loyal to the general spirit of the program. Yet I have to ask:

 “Why (the [your favourite expletive here]) is it always somebody else’s problem?”

As the father of a pre-teen, the prospect looms of hearing this rhetorical ploy on a near-daily basis (albeit the ‘owners’ of my son’s problems are likely to be more humble souls than the Greatest Figures in Western Thought, namely, his parents, his teachers, his siblings, his school-friends, in that order). Coming from a petulant adolescent, it is something I suppose I have to thole; but as an escapable part of mature generativist discourse, this stock device is wearing my patience pretty thin.

Or is it just me (my problem)?

PS. Don’t get me started on the shameless misappropriation of Kepler, Galileo and Einstein in other acolytic work.

Take any child (cross-posting)

Click for Justin on New Year's Eve

Generally, I try these days to separate my posts: Devenish (this blog) for family-related material; Inishmacsaint, for other writing. But time constraints—as well as the subject matter of this post—force me to merge and be done with it. If you only want to read family news, look away now; the same applies if you don't like opinion pieces informed by personal details. It's Friday afternoon, and I've allocated just one hour for this piece, so the results may be patchy and loose-ended...

Over the last few weeks, especially since the school shootings in Newtown, CT, I've been continually troubled by some aspects of that particular tragedy that seem to have gone unreported and so un-discussed. No, that's wrong, for it is the reporting itself, and the associated commentary, which bothers me as much as the deaths of so many children.

What upsets me is what seems to be a kind of pressure for moral equilibrium in many people's minds: that the victims of a mass killing are viewed as better, purer, more innocent, more spiritually enlightened human beings in virtue of having died together than they would have been considered to be had their deaths come not at the hands of a deranged killer, but individually, as the result of separate acts of violence, clinical negligence, childhood diseases or simple accidents in the home. Conversely, the perpetrator is viewed as increasingly evil or depraved in direct proportion to the relative youth, number, and helplessness of his victims. (As if age matters; as if teenagers or unarmed adults are any less helpless in the face of a gunman). And more evil the perpetrator, it seems the more blessed, the more innocent, even the more beautiful the victim. So, it goes, this Good and Evil, like pre-schoolers on a see-saw, each moving out from the fulcrum of moral neutrality.

One only has to examine the press and public reaction to other news stories to see the workings of our perverse moral scales. Consider these two news headlines from the UK in recent months:

• Tragic two-year-old 'who died after sipping mother's methadone from beaker had also ingested heroin and cocaine' Read more

• Girl, 15, who died after ecstasy overdose told her friends not to call ambulance. Inquest hears that Isobel Jones-Reilly found pills in university lecturer's drugs stash during an unsupervised house party. Read more

Was Riley Rettipierre less beautiful, less intelligent, less sorely missed than the CT kids because his mother was—it seems—a negligent, perhaps abusive, drug-user? Because he wasn't killed by a relative stranger but by a strange relative? And would he have been regarded as even more worthless had he died at age six, running out into the road for the first time after a ball? Was Isobel Jones-Reilly's death any less tragic than that of the children in Newtown, because she was older, or because she was to a some extent responsible for what happened? At two days, two months, two years, two decades, every child is some parent's son or daughter: the desolation and loss a parent feels is—I imagine—in no proportion to the objective beauty, intelligence, moral probity, or characteristic behaviour of their child. Nor is it greatly relevant whether the child is killed by falling off a ladder one Sunday morning (as happened to a school friend of mine, when I was 13), by being struck by a car driven by an elderly woman on her way to church, or by a joyrider high on solvents. The child is dead—and the manner of their death—however malicious, however violent, however unintended—does not alter the value of the life lived. At least, it shouldn't.

My father—to my mind, and in the view of many—was a good, kind and generous man. He died slowly of the consequences of Parkinson's disease over a period of months, a condition exacerbated by a heart operation that should have given him more, not fewer, active years. But he was not better, kinder and more generous because of this lingering death: had he died suddenly in surgery, I would miss him no less. Nor would he have been any less of a good, kind, generous man if—years earlier—he had yielded to alcoholism and died in his forties: the fate of his younger brother, Ronald, and Ronald's son, my cousin, Peter Duffield.

The story also draws attention to another related problem with popular morality: the notion—inescapable in our culture, and perpetrated by Hollywood, and popular fiction (including the tabloid press)—that there are good guys and bad guys: the children of Sandy Hook were good people in virtue of being children, the adult victims of Adam Lanza were good people by association with those children ("innocence", rather than guilt, "by association"); Adam Lanza himself was a bad person, the type of person the NRA proposes arming us all against, his evil predisposition sufficient explanation of his actions. This kind of moral fundamentalism is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the whole thing: like other kinds of religious and political dogmatism, such 'purity' destroys and corrupts everything it touches, as violently as acid on a Muslim girl's face (albeit less obviously). A facile distinction between the fair maid and the evil witch may be harmless in fairy stories for the under-fives, but it has no place in mature discourse, past elementary school. The idea that there are angels and sinners, and that we can reliably tell them apart—the bad guys are always 'the other'—or the related notion, which cognitive anthropologists call the Fundamental Attribution Fallacy, that people who act badly are inherently bad people, and conversely: these are ideas that blind us to deeper, but messier, truths. Jimmy Savile was no Josef Mengele: the many serious crimes he has been discovered to have committed do not invalidate the good things he did for other children, any more than his occasional selflessness excuses his egotistical abuse. (In one sense, Josef Mengele was not Josef Mengele either, but no amount of special pleading can really mitigate the awful suffering for which he was directly responsible.)

When my middle son Julian asked me about the shootings in Connecticut, if the same thing could happen in Japan, I told him no, it could not. 'Is that because there are only bad people in America?' he asked (Julian has persistent difficulties with grammatical scope, but that is a topic for another day). No, I said: 'it's because there there are no guns in Japan...And anyway, there are no such things as bad people: there are people who do bad things.' I really believe this, and its opposite (i.e., there are no good people, though when I look at Justin, I'm not quite sure. But that is just parental bias, probably: it also shows that I am as prey as anyone else to the first impulse I talked about: to think that being cute and relatively defenceless makes a child with Down Syndrome any more virtuous than one without. I know this though, as every parent knows: that none of my children are any less than perfect, or than perfectly equal, to me.

Well, my hour is (more than) up.

Grammatica una et eadem est (revised)

Reflections on Universal Grammar and the importance—or otherwise—of Language Diversity.

[This is the revised text of an earlier paper on Language Universals and Language Relativity: it appears in a Festschrift for my colleague David Rycroft, to mark his retirement from full-time teaching at Konan]

Download paper here 

Dressing an octopus (Vietnamese Monograph)

Just completed these three paragraphs in the revised preface. I hope they improve things.
Comments welcome

With respect to the former goal, I hope to demonstrate that a generative, Universalist approach to Vietnamese grammar can be genuinely elucidating: that the concepts and constructs of Universal Grammar, which have been postulated as part of a top-down, hypothetico-deductive strategy, and largely on the basis of (sometimes abstruse) data from a limited range of Western languages—that such concepts can be applied productively to the analysis of Vietnamese as well. What’s more, I will argue that Vietnamese can be shown to express these properties more directly, and more clearly, than is the case in more synthetic or fusional languages. Developing the ‘transparent onion’ analogy in the prefatory quote above, I shall claim that what is most remarkable about Vietnamese are the formal properties it shares with other unrelated language varieties, including English and French. What makes Vietnamese special is not, I will suggest, the properties that distinguish it from other language, but rather its unique capacity to express commonalities with such phenomenal clarity.

A reason for stressing this point is to acknowledge that many—perhaps most—scholars of Vietnamese are highly sceptical of ahistorical formal approaches to grammatical analysis, especially those based on English and French. Often, this scepticism is justified by reference to previous treatments in which Vietnamese has been analyzed directly in terms of Western surface categories or constructions; for example, an analysis that identifies the TAM markers (sẽ, đã and đang) as Tense morphemes, or one that equates null subject in Vietnamese with those in Italian or Spanish. One can always fit a square peg through a round hole if the diameter of the circle is large enough, but that doesn’t make it a good fit. In other cases, certain real or hypothetical attempts to impose Western-derived analytical constructs can appear preposterous: to seek to explain the behaviour of the modal-aspectual particle đựơc in terms of a construction-based analysis of the English or French Passive, for example, almost entirely misses the point. One can dress an octopus in a t-shirt for the sake of propriety, but little is gained by it and the problem of the other six legs remains.

Whichever metaphor is more useful, it is a fact that many linguistic scholars have rejected generative theory in the past, and that historical or functional explanations are to the fore in contemporary grammatical research. But this is to ‘throw the baby [square peg, octopus] out with the bath-water.’ In this work, I hope to make the case that—at the right level of abstraction—Vietnamese fits not just well, but nearly perfectly, into a universal template: it is the other object languages of grammatical theorising that require prodding and shuffling about. When viewed from this opposite perspective, the Generative Enterprise (as it once was called) becomes not only more attractive, but empowering: if Vietnamese offers a model of perfection, then one can ask a different set of questions: why don’t other languages seem to work so well? This brings us to my second goal, viz., to understand what Vietnamese tells us about the details of UG. At least, of a particular construal of UG; see Chapter 2.

About time (and participial interpretation)

Going through some 'odds-and-sods' files on my computer today, I found this snippet saved from a BBC News story in May 2002. As the first line clearly reveals, the article concerns a robbery at London's Heathrow Airport:

Scotland Yard officers have arrested a gang suspected of carrying out a £2m raid at Heathrow Airport.

The story is fairly unremarkable, certainly linguistically, except for the following sentence:

(i) The stolen cash arrived at Heathrow on an SAA flight.

The standard reading of this sentence is nonsensical (to me at least), since it implies that the cash was already stolen before it arrived at Heathrow on an SAA flight (perhaps in South Africa, possibly on the flight itself). But if that was the case, then there was no raid at Heathrow, merely a collection.


What is meant, of course, is given by a non-reduced version:

(ii) The cash that was stolen had arrived at Heathrow on an SAA flight.

My intuition is that the deviance of (i) is due to something stronger than Gricean implicature: that the participle stolen is temporally bound to the Event Time of the matrix verb arrived in such a way that, in order for the sentence to be true, the theft must have been complete before the arrival of the aircraft. (Once stolen and arrived are no longer clause-mates, the dependency disappears, in (ii).)

A similar queasiness attaches to "the former East Germany, the former captain of England" (though not a former captain) in sentences such as (iii); (iv) seems ok, where the expression is more deeply embedded:

(iii) She still lives in the former East Germany.

(iv) Inhabitants of larger towns in the former East Germany are experiencing spiralling energy costs.

For me, (iii) is impossible (outside of the protagonists in the movie Goodbye Lenin). But perhaps I'm the only one? Or, more likely, this has been treated well elsewhere. Either way, your comments are welcome)

Finally accepted!

After some delay, our CR/visual recall paper has finally been accepted in Cognitive Linguistics, and should appear by the end of the year: a preprint version will appear here. Meantime, an earlier version is available at:

http://anfortas1.blogspot.jp/2010/12/do-asians-really-think-differently-from.html

More on Chapter 1

Another 10 or so pages completed on Chapter 1, plus some revisions of earlier material in the chapter.

Click here to download pdf

Monograph Forthcoming? Yes!

Though progress at times may seem almost glacially slow, I continue to work on the chapters of a monograph on Vietnamese grammar that may one day be completed. Over the last months, I have continued work on Chapter 1—A Descriptive Sketch. Click on the link below for the latest version of Part 1 of this chapter (alternatively go to the Monograph page link at top)

Click to download pdf

Comments and suggestions welcome!

Unpeeling an onion: what Vietnamese tells us about the lexicon-syntax interface

Last week, I had the great fortune to attend the International Conference on Linguistics Training and Research in Vietnam, held at USSH, VNU, Hanoi. My first visit to Vietnam, I hope the first of many. During my stay, I was able to give two presentations. I'm posting the slides from the first colloquium talk, which will be written up more fully shortly (and essentially a synopsis of Chapter 1 of the elusive, but not quite mythical, monograph). In the meantime, there should be enough on the slides to make for useful reading. If you have comments or questions—about Vietnamese syntax, though not about onions—please get in touch.

Click to view presentation

(I've replaced the html version with a pdf file, which should be easier to read)