tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50853783471688501382023-12-09T15:28:54.735-08:00on languageas a self-organized systemtomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-70375094066082174812023-11-22T07:08:00.000-08:002023-11-22T07:08:25.088-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Wkdb9oBteRHqdZc_NrJnsgzjo5mqR9VnMMfzqIbgvMfHlsVmOzjEdsWghz-jOATd4XOxzjjpvKPVLKimK5dp_nkK1aACJ8ipA2554pPbuQyuxfTz8bS5zynU6_q3m-PMvLPr-DYDEgfHgD98juLNIQGorH9cXTGV3Rfcsk2S38i-YEoVbg0zJd30ho0/s1336/elevatork.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1336" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Wkdb9oBteRHqdZc_NrJnsgzjo5mqR9VnMMfzqIbgvMfHlsVmOzjEdsWghz-jOATd4XOxzjjpvKPVLKimK5dp_nkK1aACJ8ipA2554pPbuQyuxfTz8bS5zynU6_q3m-PMvLPr-DYDEgfHgD98juLNIQGorH9cXTGV3Rfcsk2S38i-YEoVbg0zJd30ho0/s400/elevatork.jpg"/></a></div>tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-55346971154282545572023-11-22T07:00:00.000-08:002023-11-22T07:00:15.173-08:00Vowels in an ElevatorThank God I've finally got to the point where I can finish this work. I've held it out, psychologically, as the only book on my bucket list, a culmination of working teaching language for thirty years and raising ten children, watching some or most of them learn language themselves. It is my work's answer to my training and what I feel was wrong with it. It is my theoretical explanation of language.
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As I look at the manuscript that I'd started (I'd written about fifty pages), I feel like it's crap. I have to start over again. No problem, though, what's fifty pages once you get going? And I can already tell, I'll probably start several more times before I get the one I need. But it's written in my head; that's the most important part.
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The title can be explained very simply; in fact if you are a follower of this blog you have already read it. This blog is a collection of sources related to the idea that language is a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one that can be described as similar to an elevator where a number of people shift around to make themselves more comfortable, and end up in a perfect pattern whereby there is maximum distance between each of them. The fact that vowels do this in a language - preserve maximum distance between them - makes a lot of sense, yet is hard to explain. That is my goal. A self organizing system, in brief, is one in which the players all make an organization by doing what their own little job is; they may be unaware of the grand organization, and they certainly aren't being <i>told</i> to organize in a pattern. Looked at from above, one might conclude that the whole organization is perfect, like a mandala. But it is simply a product of individual small actors doing their part.
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So right now I'm practicing so I can make a better blurb, when the time comes. It will be self-published. I'll show some pictures soon.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-85609330922543608372023-11-20T08:16:00.000-08:002023-11-20T08:16:39.153-08:00sources<p> </p><ol class="ArticleReferences_orderedReferences__mJr9M" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: STIXGeneral-Regular; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 15px 0px; padding-left: 32px; text-align: justify;"><li class="ArticleReferences_articleReference__ouEuh" id="B3" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 10px 0px; padding-left: 10px;"><div class="referenceContent" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p class="referenceText" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; word-break: break-word;">G. K. Zipf, <span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology</span>, Addison-Wesley, Boston, Mass, USA, 1949</p><p class="referenceText" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><br /></p><p class="referenceText" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; word-break: break-word;">P. Bak, <span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality</span>, Copernicus Publications, Göttingen, Germany, 1996. View at: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5426-1" rel="noreferrer" style="box-shadow: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d8a17; cursor: pointer; outline: none; text-decoration-skip: objects; text-decoration: none; touch-action: manipulation; transition: box-shadow 0.3s;" target="_blank">Publisher Site</a><span class="sep" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; float: none; font-size: 17px; height: 15px; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"> | </span><a href="https://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=MR1417042" rel="noreferrer" style="box-shadow: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d8a17; cursor: pointer; outline: none; text-decoration-skip: objects; text-decoration: none; touch-action: manipulation; transition: box-shadow 0.3s;" target="_blank">MathSciNet</a></p><p class="referenceText" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><br /></p><p class="referenceText" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; word-break: break-word;">G. Pruessner, <span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic;">Self-Organized Criticality</span>, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2012. View at: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511977671" rel="noreferrer" style="box-shadow: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4d8a17; cursor: pointer; outline: none; text-decoration-skip: objects; text-decoration: none; touch-action: manipulation; transition: box-shadow 0.3s;" target="_blank">Publisher Site</a></p><p class="referenceText" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; font-family: "IBM Plex Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: start;"><br /></span></p><p class="referenceText" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; font-family: "IBM Plex Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: start;">Vasilii A. Gromov, Anastasia M. Migrina, "A Language as a Self-Organized Critical System", </span><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "IBM Plex Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; text-align: start;">Complexity</span><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; font-family: "IBM Plex Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: start;">, vol. 2017, Article ID 9212538, 7 pages, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9212538</span></p></div></li></ol>tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-45538800939444566672023-11-20T07:05:00.000-08:002023-11-20T07:05:37.072-08:00<p>Jensen, Henrik. J. (2012, Sept. Foreword to <i>Self-Organized Critcality. </i>Cambridge Univ. Press. </p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">When Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) was first introduced in 1987 by Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld, it was suggested to be</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span class="italic" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">the</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">explanation of the fractal structures surrounding us everywhere in space and time. The very poetic intuitive appeal of the combination of terms self-organisation and criticality, meant that the field gained immediate attention. The excitement was not lowered much by the fact that the claimed 1/</span><span class="italic" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-caps: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">f</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;">and fractal behaviour were soon realised in reality not to be present in the sandpile model used by the authors to introduce their research agenda. Nor did the lack of power laws in experiments on real piles of sand deter investigators from interpreting pieces of power laws observed in various theoretical models and physical systems as evidence of SOC being essentially everywhere. This led rapidly to a strong polarisation between two camps. On the one side there was the group of researchers who did not worry about the lack of a reasonably precise exclusive definition of the SOC concept and therefore tended to use SOC as synonymous with snippets of power laws, rendering the term fairly meaningless. The other camp maintained that SOC was not to be taken seriously. They arrived at this conclusion through a mixture of factors including the observation that SOC was ill defined, not demonstrated convincingly in models, and absent from experiments on sandpiles. The debate sometimes reflected a reaction in response to bruises received during fierce exchanges at meetings as much as a reaction to scientific evidence.</span></p><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-64060590810636693402023-04-13T15:07:00.001-07:002023-04-13T15:07:15.976-07:00General reportThere is not much new to report, actually. I am about to write my book, <i>Vowels in an Elevator</i>, which I will explain in a minute. I will give a brief overview of the book. I have written about a third of it and just have to fill out the details, or rather, the meat of it. It is not simple. It will take a lot of concentration on my part and time to myself is not something I've had in recent years. Even now, I am finishing a book about Puritan New England and have had trouble getting hours to click together to work on it.
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So here is the gist of the book: Chomsky has been wrong. From the beginning we linguists have been looking for the science that is the foundation of language, and Chomsky claimed to have found "universals," and his universalist doctrine has prevailed in the field of linguistics for as long as I have been studying it. But what he has come up with after all these years is that human language has recursion, while animal language does not. Well, this may be true, but it doesn't give us the scientific underpinning we need to make generalizations about all languages. My book will begin by showing how Chomsky's theories have not panned out nor allowed us to have a satisfactory explanation of what languages have in common.
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The science of self-organizing systems, however, <i>does</i> give us that explanation, so the book will ultimately go into the relationship between symbols and language, and the science behind understanding the behavior of human perception of symbols. The problem with language is that it is so bound up in perception that one must be able to scientifically explain perception in order to scientifically explain language. But it can be done.
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This site has within it most of the links I need to finish the work. I have not done much searching in recent years but I know from what limited contact I have with the linguistics world that there is very little meaningful work being done on language as a self-organizing system. What work has been done is back in my notes somewhere and will have to be pulled out, aired out, investigated, etc. Work on behavior of self-organizing systems is mostly scattered in other fields. But a well-written work will connect language with other scientific systems in such a way that there will be no doubt that linguistics can be a science of language production.
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I am sorry to let this site die away a little as I've been preoccupied with other things. I have ten children, the last three adopted (three others <i>step</i>), but the last ones have somewhat filled my plate, and made my retirement a little busier than I had planned. At the same time I have twenty-seven other books on the market, and every time I try to do something esl/linguistics oriented I get a slight back-to-work headache whereas in the process of marketing my books (haiku/short stories/novel/historical biography) I get rushes of egomaniacal self-satisfaction. So I've put a stall on <i>Vowels in an Elevator</i> for way too long.
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Finally, let me explain the title. If you were to have a seat at the top of an elevator which had a glass ceiling, and watched as a number of people got in the elevator, you would notice a perfect kind of pattern-making where every person makes as much space as possible between himself/herself and every other person, thus making the entire elevator take on the image of a perfect mandala or a perfect pattern. You would conjure up a rule of mandala-creation that said that there is a rule that people must create a perfect mandala pattern. The same thing happens with vowels in our mouths. Is there a rule that says vowels have to make as much space between them as possible? Well, you would think so, because they do. And they do because that is easier for people's perceptions. People do it naturally, because they are acting in their own best interest.
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Case closed. Stay in touch.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-6827721860741502772021-12-05T08:48:00.001-08:002021-12-05T08:48:24.639-08:00Another update - more than a year laterWhat has given some urgency to this situation is that, coming around the corner from sixty seven to sixty eight, I am beginning to realize that my time is running out. I have a solid idea of what I want to write. I even have it largely finished, although it needs quite a bit of work. I just have to get it out there.
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The book, <i>Vowels in an Elevator</i>, is about finding the science in language and language change, in a situation where Chomsky has largely been defeated but nobody has risen to take his place.
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By defeated I mean that though his theories still reign in the world of teaching linguistics, his sixty-year search for language universals has been reduced to the idea that human language has "recursion" while many or most animal languages don't have it. As I do with most of his ideas, I question such things immediately and wonder several things. First, who says animals can't do recursion? Who can prove it? If we don't know what dolphins are saying, how can we know they don't have recursion?
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Second, if recursion is a language's being able to refer to itself, a layering of symbolism as it were, then what we are saying is that humans at least as we know them now have enough braind power, or gave themselves enough brain power, to keep track of such things (such as, My friends Peter and Paul married Joan and Mary, respectively), thus having a characteristic of reference and keeping track that supposedly animals can't do. But there is nothing special grammatically about this. It negates all his previous ideas about how grammar was some kind of magical characteristic that we were genetically programmed to be able to figure out, and this genetic magical characteristic (the Language Acquisition Device) was programmed with all these restrictions or laws that somehow just appeared in our genetic programming. All that turns out to be hogwash, which is what I suspected from the minute i heard it. It sounded good, and Chomsky sold it worldwide, and people are still spouting it, but it's hogwash.
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So what's the truth? Stay tuned and I'll put it forward, as soon as I can.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-81455354038812859582020-07-01T15:15:00.000-07:002020-07-01T15:15:29.506-07:002020 UpdateThere is no news on the language-as-a-self-organizing-system front. I have not finished my book, and have not even worked on it. Nobody I know is doing work on language-as-a-self-organizing-system.
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Ah, but here's the rub. Language is a self-organizing system. I know it. I will write a book about it. That book will explain everything.
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Feel free to comment if you agree, or know someone who can help me with this. During the lockdown, I've been writing 1) lots of family history; 2) short stories; 3) haiku; 4) a novel about the Actualists. I still hope to do my memoirs and this.
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This, Language as a Self-Organizing System, is most important, because it represents a lifetime of observing and noticing the structure of language as people grapple with it and try to learn it. I wasn't wasting my time; I have a lot to contribute; I want to do it before I'm senile and it's too late.
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If you are interested in anything I have just said, most of my work on the subject is linked off of this blog. It's no secret. It just has to be compiled into a reasonable theory book. And it will get done, sooner rather than later, because this lockdown deal isn't going anywhere. I'm finally retired, and <i>could</i> do it if I put my mind to it.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-52090560628123562322019-08-27T12:29:00.000-07:002019-08-27T12:29:19.403-07:00UpdateRecently I've taken what I'd written about language as a self-organizing system, and compiled it into a book of about sixty pages. It has about a page of sources, and it runs through much of my thinking as I've tried to put it into order. Though I know it's not done, it's reached a certain point where I have to reach out and find other sources, to help me say what I want to say. When I returned to this blog, I was stunned to find what I found.
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Not that this blog will be enough. What is connected off this blog are several things: links to dozens of documents that I wrote myself, in the last decade; links to other books that I reviewed or read; ideas of other sources that could be used in laying out my vision. All of these are useful and will take some time to slog through. But it's still not enough.
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One thing I've found is that language as a self-organizing system has pretty much fallen off the radar. I have stayed in touch with the linguist list over the years, and have found <i>nothing</i>. Nobody has bothered to put together a cohesive explanation of how a language could seek order, simplify itself, and change over time. In some ways that's good: I have the field to myself. In some ways it's scary: if it's so clear to me, why has nobody jumped on it before?
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The idea for my book, <i>Vowels in an Elevator: Principles of language as a self-organizing system</i>, is pretty much contained in Google docs that are linked off of this blog. The one that shares its name is not available, as are a couple more; I'm not sure why. In fact I'm surprised that google docs, and the weblog itself, could manage to survive as long as it did; I've ignored the whole thing for what, about seven years. I make no excuses; I have ten kids, and things happening that cause instability in my own family situation, so I get to it when I can. But I am what, sixty five, and I'm beginning to think that if I don't get it down on paper coherently, it will be lost. Now is the time to compile it and present it. And don't worry if the rest of the world is ignoring it as a coherent theory of language change.
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So in the spirit of gathering resources I'm going to ask a few questions. I know that nobody really reads these blogs all that much, but there's a chance they'll stumble on this one, so, if you don't mind, and if you know the answers to these questions, would you kindly just put those answers in the comments. What I'm saying is that, to some degree, I'm talking to myself, but, I really do welcome input of all kinds and would love to hear anything you have to contribute.
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Is there any cohesive attempt anywhere to explain language as a self-organizing system?<br>
How do I go about even <i>looking</i> for such things, given that my attempts so far have been so fruitless?<br>
Should I leave these google docs where they are, or compile them into a separate volume of writing on language acquisition?<br>
Do people actually <i>read</i> google docs, <i>or</i> blogs?
Good night.
tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-49640644893447018122013-05-21T09:46:00.001-07:002013-05-21T09:46:22.658-07:00The Self-Organizing EconomyKrugman, Paul. (1996). The Self-Organizing Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
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The concept of self-organization is difficult (for me) to get a grasp on, so I turned to this well-known writer who tackled economics. What I like about him is that he's always conversational in tone, and I have to be the same way, because I'm explaining language to people who already know quite a bit, but don't know self-organization. But second, he actually went as far as to work out the math; this I admire him for, and don't know if I can do the same for language.
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Now it's time to return the book to the library (though I could just renew it); I've had it for months, and I need to mine it for quotes and get it out of here. I'm sure somebody else could use it!
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He points out that scientists of complexity theory have not had much luck with economics and economists, because:
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the authors of articles and books on complexity almost never talk to serious economists or read what serious economists write; as a result, claims about the applicability of the new ideas to economics are usually coupled with statements about how economies work (and what economists know) that are so ill-informed as to make any economist who happens to encounter them dismiss the whole enterprise. (p. 2)
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His definition of a self-organizing system is the following:
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...what links the study of embryos and hurricanes, of magnetic materials and collections of neurons,is that they are all <i>self-organizing systems:</i> systems that, even when they start from an almost homogeneous or almost random state, spontaneously form large-scale patterns. (p. 3)</blockquote></font size>
Self-organization is not always good:
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...self-organization is not necessarily, or even presumptively, a good thing. I think it is fair to accuse many of the writers on complexity, especially but not only the more popular ones, of falling into this fallacy...Self organization is something we observe and try to understand, not necessarily something we want. (p. 6)
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This part is about Schelling and his model of how neighborhoods become segregated:
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Thus Schelling derived, without any fanfare, a theme of many writers on complexity: local, short-range interactions can create large-scale structure. (p. 17)
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About the field of complexity in general:
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...the whole rationale of the field is the idea that common principles may apply to subjects with very different details....(p. 29)
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His main thesis is that economics is a self-organizing system in two senses that are shown by complexity theorists to be properties of self-organizing systems. First is that:
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starting from disordered initial conditions they tend to move to highly ordered behavior, and at least in a statistical sense this behavior exhibits surprisingly simple regularities...(p. 36)
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The second sense is that they create order from random growth. (p. 37). Of this he tells a story:
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Take a ceramic object, say a Grecian urn, and throw it hard against a stone wall, so that it shatters randomly into innumerable pieces. Surely such an act can do nothing but create disorder! And yet (so <i>The Economist</i> tells us) a strange hidden order emerges. Carefully gather up the pieces larger than 0.1 grams, the number larger than 0.01 grams, and so on, and you will find something remarkable: the pieces will obey a power law. And not just any power law: if it really was a Grecian urn, the exponent will take on a particular value; if it was a ceramic sphere it will take on another value; and so on. That is, a seemingly disorderly and complex process of fragmentation (which is random growth with a minus sign) produces the simple order of a power law, and the exponent of that power law contains important information - in this case, incredibly, it turns out to reveal the shape of the original object. (p. 49)
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Here is a complexity theory bibliography:
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Bak, P. (1991). Self-organizing criticality, <i>Scientific American</i> (January).<br>
Kauffman, S. (1993). <i>The Origins of Order</i>. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.<br>
Lewin, R. (1992). <i>Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos</i>. New York: Macmillan.<br>
Nicolis, G. and Prigogine, I. (1989). <i>Exploring Complexity</i>. New York: W.H. Freeman.<br>
Schelling, T. (1978). <i>Micromotives and Macrobehavior</i>. New York: W.W. Norton.<br>
Waldrop, W. M. (1993). <i>Complexity</i>. New York: Basic Books.<br>
</blockquote></font size>tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-16697807978944082942013-05-10T13:30:00.001-07:002013-05-10T13:30:55.862-07:00Harrison, K. D. (2007). When Languages Die: The extinction of the world's languages and the erosion of human knowledge. New York: Oxford.
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I was impressed by this book, which I taught in the last part of the spring, maybe April to now. The author is a professor at Swarthmore and took almost twelve years crossing the globe, talking to people in remote places about their endangered languages. In the course of finding out why their languages are endangered, and what they are doing about it, he also was able to make generalizations about indigenous languages in general, about world trends, etc.
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These languages have a wide variety of ways to talk about numbers, from the Melanesians, who invented abstract math independently, to the Piraha, who have no use for numbers at all, really. Languages have different ways of orienting their people in space; they have ways of talking about where they are and how to get where they want to go.
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So what do they have in common? Very little, according to Dr. Harrison. Greenberg's universals, which intend to find commonalities among the ways they talk about numbers, can all be disproven, one at a time. Dr. Harrison does not pretend to hold up Chomsky's ideas; in fact, he calls Chomsky narrow, unnecessarily focused on the world's "major" languages, and unnecessarily focused on grammar, at the expense of the other building blocks of language. Some of what he concluded, I will copy below:
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The lack of meaning does not hinder linguists in our investigation of mental structures: we have come to focus mainly on the structures themselves, not their cultural meanings. This has been the conventional wisdom in linguistics for at least four decades. But although languages certainly contain abstract structures, they evolve and exist to convey information within a specific cultural matrix, and that function permeates and influences every level of language. To its critics, including me, the Chomskyan program has been unduly narrow, overly focused on large, globally dominant languages, and preoccupied with structure at the expense of content. (pp. 205-206)
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It was also inspirational to me that, essentially, he said that language was a self-organizing system.
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...when we sum up all these discoveries, both across many languages and within a single one, we achieve a clearer insight into the grand realm of human cognition. Language may by its very structure force speakers to attend to certain qualities of the world (shape, size, gender, countability). Languages are self-organizing systems that evolve complex nested structures and rules for how to put the parts of words or sentences together. No two languages do this in the same way. (p. 236)
</font size></blockquote>tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-41075573706027782152013-05-09T12:30:00.002-07:002013-05-09T12:30:27.553-07:00Leverett, T. (2013, May). <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l5E7PuK16JS1xsmpR9SlTCRn8sfXNEeBrZAfFjbR4f0/edit?usp=sharing">13th floor, please: Vowels on an elevator.</a> Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1l5E7PuK16JS1xsmpR9SlTCRn8sfXNEeBrZAfFjbR4f0/edit?usp=sharing. tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-57439717396623605712013-02-02T14:55:00.000-08:002013-02-02T14:55:03.271-08:00gender revisitedIn class the other day I told my students of what they told me in graduate school. Gender was a language characteristic, a grammatical thing, whereas sex was a biological thing, and they weren't to be confused. That's because some languages marked gender, male or female, on things that weren't alive; some marked them with neuter in some cases, etc. A gender marker was a separate idea from sex or gender as we knew it in the physical sense.
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Now in the time since then both words, "sex" and "gender" have changed somewhat in people's interpretation, but the truth behind it is the same. A language's marking is separate from the physical characteristics of the thing marked. Just for example, I said, is there any good reason "book" is male in Spanish?
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One student brought up the possibility that there <i>was</i> a good reason in the past, or at least a reason, in this case perhaps that men ruled the world of books at the time it was decided. Yes, but men also ruled the world of ships, and made ships feminine, one woman pointed out.
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I said that in our culture we have an ongoing discussion about gendered things, words like "mankind" being applied to everyone, grammatical issues like "everyone brought his/her/their umbrella today" and that the essence of the discussion is that people are being more literal about pronouns and gender-marked things, thus rejecting the idea of using male words for everyone, etc. My question was whether this was happening in other cultures as well.
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Two women mentioned that in Spanish, it was an issue how one addresses a group of mixed men and women; the standard rule was that if a group included even one male, it was considered male. One man who speaks German pointed out that in German, new words and borrowed words such as "computer" were all neuter these days.
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I found these observations interesting and vowed to do research on the topic. My questions remain; I suspect that it's <i>always</i> an issue and has always been one. I remember noticing these problems immediately upon learning languages like Spanish and French (What do you call a dog that you don't know? or a group of them? Why are books male and windows female? What if you have books and windows together? etc.) or German (How do you decide which 'things' are neuter? Does male + female = neuter, and if not why not?). A glorious can of worms.
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I remember the relative randomness of the answers drawing me into the study of language as I suspected that the 'reasons' for such things were actually subtle but powerful forces in our lives. Things happen, languages change, and it can happen fairly quickly over time. My questions (above) remain. I'll do research and get back to you. tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-50391430361514590962012-12-30T21:14:00.002-08:002012-12-30T21:14:25.056-08:00The SVO mythThere's a benefit to the world getting smaller, and our being able to know more information, have it at our fingertips, be more worldly, etc. And that is, people no longer pawn off assumptions based on parochial thinking, that don't stand up to the facts. At least they do this <i>less</i>, because they're more likely to be proven wrong, and they're <i>more careful</i> about their assertions, because it's so easy to check the great database and prove someone wrong. This is why I never make assertions.
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Ah, but here's one I can't resist. It's all very tentative, because what do I know? That's why I put it in a blog, and not, say, in a published academic journal. But I've been around the block a few times, and I'm sharing the best of my observations here. Take them or leave them.
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When I was in graduate school (80's), the concept of SVO languages came into my field of perception. English, they said, was an SVO language, and so was Chinese, but Korean was SOV, verb last. S=subject, V=verb, 0=object.
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Now the assumptions behind this observation were not stated directly, but it could be inferred that S, V and O were the main building blocks of a language, and that all languages would have them. Sure, they'd also have <i>genitive</i>, and <i>instrumental</i>, and <i>locative</i> and all that other fine stuff. But at their base, they were the actor, the action, and the victim. <i>He kicked the desk.</i> In English, you could say, sometimes there was no object. But generally there was <i>always</i> a subject, except when it was understood, as in <i>Kick the desk.</i>
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So I remember wondering: why would you separate the object from the verb? So I asked: is there any such thing as an OSV language? Or VSO? I was assured that there were such things but the proof wasn't immediately forthcoming. Someone at some point allowed that they weren't distributed evenly among the what, six possibilities?
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But as it turns out, this view, that there are six different kinds, whether languages distribute evenly or not, is not very useful. I have found languages that don't really have <i>subjects</i>; instead, they have <i>topics</i> and they omit those whenever possible. So where we'd like to think of subject and predicate as the two basic placeholders, like Mom and Dad, of a sentence, the fact is, there are a lot of languages where even SOV, or (S)(O)V is a fairly inaccurate way of describing them, even though it may be true to the order. You end up saying that, for the vast majority of this language's sentences, they have a subject, but it's understood, they just give you the topic, and you figure out who did it. A sentence that can be translated literally as, "As for me, the desk-victim kick-past" forces you to <i>interpret</i> an actor, which is not really a problem if you get used to it, but makes it hard really to maintain that the actor is the big honcho of a sentence, one of two main characters. And a LOT of languages are like this.
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So what to make of it? I've noticed that people use terms like "SOV" and "SVO" a lot less these days, and maybe it's just as well, rather than beat a dog that's down already, I'll just let it die a natural death and start talking about languages another way. But somehow, I've been unable to let it die peacefully in my mind. That's because I think it is representative of another problem: that we in the west are so quick to assume that the construction of every language we've ever learned (English, Spanish, maybe a tad of French or German) makes it necessary that <i>all</i> languages share these properties, that S V & O are building blocks of <i>our</i> language because they must be natural inherent big honchos in every sentence that's ever been made in <i>any</i> language. It's just one more case of a kind of western ethnocentrism, and ultimately isn't very helpful in classifying the worlds's languages.
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So how <i>should</i> we classify them? I have no idea. Linguists use words like "agglutinative" vs. "non-agglutinative" but I fancy myself a linguist, and couldn't even explain what that is, let alone assure you that there is such a thing as that second one. One thing about S V O, is that at least <i>we could explain what it meant</i>...and that's why it stuck around linguistics books for so long. Not because evidence provided any support for classifying languages in that way.
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One final irony: you'd think that, sharing an SVO structure would make a language essentially easier to learn. Thus, Chinese would be easier (for us) to learn than, say, Korean. I'm not sure that's true. The Chinese have that SVO order, all right, but
<i>everything else</i> is so different, including the <i>function of grammar within the language</i>, that Chinese I think is one of the <i>hardest</i> languages for us to learn. It's one thing to say, I don't think a language is going to change its <i>basic order</i> very easily; in other words, if our languages are SVO today, they'll probably be SVO tomorrow. An order, or a way of constructing sentences, does in some kind of way seem to be a fundamental characteristic of a language. But, though we and the Chinese both construct our sentences with subject first (and they presumably <i>have</i> subjects, unlike Korean), Chinese learners are famously stumped by English grammar. It brings up the question of whether patterns that are similar to yours, but way different in some ways, are actually <i>harder</i> to learn, than patterns that are just way different from the very start. There's an argument to be had, in there, somewhere.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-38591974052859205522012-12-30T16:08:00.000-08:002012-12-30T16:35:26.708-08:00spanglish: two sourcesJust before the term was out I got some information about so-called Spanglish, but things were busy and I was unable to write much of it down. Now, in the heart of break, I am remembering some of it and hoping to write down what I know so that it's not lost altogether. Sometimes ruminating about what I know helps me at least come up with the right questions. There will be more sources, I'm sure, but if I don't know how to approach the subject, I won't get much information.
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One problem was that my students were <i>very</i> naive about grammatical rules and linguistics in general. I phrased the problem as this: We know that there is a lot of language-mixing going on. We know that people make sentences that use both languages (English and Spanish) freely. The question is this: Is this widespread enough, with a large enough community, that this language begins to have its own rules? And if it has its own rules, what are they? Would they be the same where Spanglish is spoken in California and New York? Can we prove that it's a language of its own? I invited them, in a prompt for a research paper, to enter the discussion and try to prove it one way or the other.
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When I brought it up in class, I got very little argument, because they really had little concept of what I meant by "rules." They even now have little concept of rules, as we know them, in English, and corresponding but different rules in Spanish. My interest really is in the interaction of these rules. I wanted to know what <i>happens</i>.
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One of the most helpful people to me was I.D., who identified herself as being from Lubbock, but seemed to have relatives elsewhere in Texas and roots in Mexico. She said that Spanglish was a way of life when she was growing up, but she called it Tex-Mex. "Isn't Tex-Mex a kind of food?" I asked her, but she was more comfortable using the term "Tex-Mex" for what she spoke. It's definitely not Pachuco, she said, though I was unfamiliar with that term. She explained that there was a Californian side of this picture, where it's glorified in movies and such, and made to sound fancy, or glorified. She felt that what happened on a day-to-day basis in Texas was quite removed from this and wasn't described adequately by what one could experience in the media.
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She gave examples which all seemed to be English words or expressions that had been worked into a Spanish system. By Spanish system I mean they <i>sounded</i> Spanish and had Spanish endings, gender, Spanish grammar. Tex-Mex would simply take an English word, say "truck", and make it "troca", and "park" became "parquear" or some such; clearly borrowed words that were integrated into Spanish pronunciation and grammar. She admitted to mixing Spanish and English within a single sentence; it happened all the time.
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One thing she made clear which was verified by the second source. It really depended on context, how much you used, and what you did. She had one grandmother who wouldn't tolerate it, either that, or didn't know the English words, so she in effect had to use Spanish 100% of the time at that grandmother's house. Another grandmother had very limited tolerance of it. It wasn't that she couldn't understand, but because she wouldn't use it and they respected her, they wouldn't use it around her. She said, the young used it all the time; they lived in a bilingual world, and switched freely. To the older generation, it had different meaning.
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One thing that has become clear to me since I got here, independent of the sources, is that the Spanish-speaking Texan community feels a little isolated from Mexico itself. A whole swath of northern Mexico has been overrun by drug lords to such a degree that people don't feel as comfortable visiting, or traveling through, as they used to. They still call family in Mexico as often as possible, and visit whenever they can. They have problems at the border as there is a heightened sense of watchfulness of people coming and going. It is just not as easy as it used to be; Mexican-Americans have in effect stepped out of that problem but in the process have isolated themselves from their community back home, which in many cases is going through the political turmoil of adjusting to the terror of very wealthy drug gangs.
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A second source, C.L., identified himself as from Austin, and also claimed that Spanglish was a way of life for him as he grew up. If there are no rules, he wrote, let's make some, because this is definitely a language. He also maintained that it was different for his generation and that of his parents. The parents, he said, would use it for a different reason, to show that they were trying to fit in to the new world. We kids, he said, would use a lot more of it, and would use it sometimes to aggravate the elders.
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He gave a number of examples, but I was unable, overall, to answer my own questions. If it had rules, what were they? Also, I misplaced the paper; it does not seem to be where I left it, though I'm sure it's around and will bring up more questions when I find it and reread it. The impression I got, that stuck with me, was the emotional nature of its use. These were kids who lived in two worlds; they grew up in two worlds. They spoke two languages interchangeably with each other, as something they shared, but, being bilingual, could slip immediately into either all-English (school) or all-Spanish (grandmother's house). Their concept of rules for <i>either</i> language was somewhat limited, so they had no examples of times when one language's rules would interact with another's. I don't get a sense of an organized community developing something and going in its own direction, or having rules such as, "when we make noun phrase constructions in this mixed language, we generally do it this way". It happens spontaneously, but it happens a lot, because you are talking about millions of people now, in Texas alone.
tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-64636933998676972452012-12-29T10:41:00.000-08:002012-12-30T19:23:11.269-08:00so far1. Leverett, T. (2012, Jan.) <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j2SLvs6HF7CPQ6CYcHikZzHkOS2EV5W1z2IV4doiO1k/edit">Right metaphor, wrong conclusion</a>. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j2SLvs6HF7CPQ6CYcHikZzHkOS2EV5W1z2IV4doiO1k/edit.
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2. ___. (2012, Dec.) <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/19eU6DYbuMIoobGpDEa99SamegqRf0ZifvjClV_u5_pg/edit">Principles of language construction and change</a>. https://docs.google.com/document/d/19eU6DYbuMIoobGpDEa99SamegqRf0ZifvjClV_u5_pg/edit.
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3. ___. (2012, Dec.) <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_DQ6FDAf6CjujJ1SFW1iNoOUgPjJuREIcrIuuN1p-k/edit">The centrality of perception</a>. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18_DQ6FDAf6CjujJ1SFW1iNoOUgPjJuREIcrIuuN1p-k/edit.
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4. ___. (2012, Dec. <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ioiPeeanVq_ZFL6y_i0p7EnNO_S3kiMNMLeF-iyGZYM/edit">Differences in Self-organizing systems</a>. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ioiPeeanVq_ZFL6y_i0p7EnNO_S3kiMNMLeF-iyGZYM/edit.
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a. ___. (2012, July). <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/13rmxVLpnx3-6A7Kz4FqY9ylX7yxHTL7p_ReWJluso5M/edit">Symbols and the language learner</a>. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/13rmxVLpnx3-6A7Kz4FqY9ylX7yxHTL7p_ReWJluso5M/edit.
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b. ___. 2012, July). <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xnyTaAIqY5necN8WeXL5nnebYEc3h4ihL-sFP-yuxtg/edit">Koutsoudas' first principle</a>. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xnyTaAIqY5necN8WeXL5nnebYEc3h4ihL-sFP-yuxtg/edit.
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c. ___. 2012, May). <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b7ibffTbB-gDGmJJnCUtclUZrjFE71T1lqL9XmQysLw/edit">Saussure and the Oral-writing relationship</a>.
Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b7ibffTbB-gDGmJJnCUtclUZrjFE71T1lqL9XmQysLw/edit.
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d. ___. 2012, Dec. <a href="https://docs.google.com/a/siu.edu/document/d/1oCtw1VUeKAMZ83zr7w9qyPPdTjHu4V_QrA4ebOJJI18/edit">The role of intonation</a>. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/a/siu.edu/document/d/1oCtw1VUeKAMZ83zr7w9qyPPdTjHu4V_QrA4ebOJJI18/edit.
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OK, so here's what I've got, besides what I wrote back eight or nine years ago. I wrote #1 as the introduction, a year ago, and then, in my opinion, #a-c were diversions. It was necessary to say them, I think, but as I read them, I notice that they are disorganized, and often say more than they imply, but not quite in good order, etc. I have now gone back and written #2 and will continue. #1 and #2 and the numbered ones are the book as it's developed. I want to save #a-c, as records of my thinking, but I will not use them or include them as chapters of the book.
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I have a question about these Google docs. I put things here, because I can look at them, and revise them, and get comments on them, have my friends read them, etc. Yet I always feel that the computer is treating me differently, as an editor etc., than my friends who are coming in from some outside computer. How do I see them as they see them? How do I know they are seeing anything at all? And why, if they are "publicly available", do they not show up on searches, when I search for them?
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Mysteries for another day.
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In addition, by the way, here is more <a href="http://strangler2theloop.blogspot.com/2011/01/leverett-t.html">writing</a>.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-43195585640486022052012-12-27T19:57:00.000-08:002012-12-29T10:42:55.576-08:00Chomsky, sometimes you're of full itThere are two things that always bugged me about Chomsky and his 50-year run dominating the field of linguistics. There are plenty of things that <i>didn't</i> bug me, including the fact that he really knew his grammar, and that he was against the Vietnam War; however, these things just tended to entrench his rule and kept people from seeing the more obvious problems with his philosophy.
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Yes, so the first one was that he was wrong. He talked about universals, and he framed them in terms of restrictions, and worse yet restrictions that we have <i>access to</i>, as if being born into humanity is like being put into a genetic, biological straitjacket which now demands that we see things hierarchically, construct languages in certain ways, etc. Yet history and even modern textbooks are full of these alleged "universals" that haven't panned out. All languages have subjects? No, lots don't. All languages pluralize noun phrases at the phrasal level? No, many don't have a phrasal level, or even a concept of "pluralize" that we could call universal. All languages have ways to count? No. All languages express basic human relationships like father, mother, etc.? No. All languages have recursion?
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This last one seemed to be Chomsky's last stand, and I have to stay out of it, partly because recursion could conceivably be defined so broadly that all languages <i>must</i> have it, but also because the one guy who disproved even that (pointing out that the Piraha of Brazil don't have it) - well, he could be right or could be wrong, depending on what you figure out after you put six or seven years into learning <i>their</i> language. So the jury's still our on that, but even if everyone had recursion, would that be a universal? And if so, what value would it have; what would it prove?
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The second thing that really, really bothered me about Chomsky was the language. It's true that all academic fields have their own language, and that in many cases this language is incomprehensible to laymen. I accept that. But after reading enough Chomsky, and the work of his followers and those who have adapted the language of argument in this case, I've come to several conclusions. First, framing it negatively ("access" to restrictions) is the wrong approach to finding universals. Second, you don't have to get very deep into it before you realize that you've lost touch with the basic workings of the human brain. The whole point, after all, is to <i>replicate</i> the way the average person sees and explains the language. I think it's good to keep that in mind <i>every step of the way</i>. My international students are fond of saying that English grammar is very hard, very twisted, extremely hard to comprehend and master. Actually I think they're wrong about this. It may be extremely different from <i>theirs</i>, and may have patterns that are hard to get used to. But in its fundamental nature it's not <i>made to confuse</i>, it's <i>made to be mastered by as many people as possible</i>. And therefore the language we use to describe it should resonate with what we did as children to figure it out.
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We in the native-English-speaking community learned our language as a basic part of our environment, much like mastering tying our shoes (which was common in that era) or riding a bicycle (also a common thing that kids did). We never really made a conscious choice to learn it, but we did have several years to listen to it before we felt pressured into actually using it, and even then our parents knew most of what we wanted without the words (they were in the habit of giving it to us anyway) and they greatly encouraged all our speaking efforts. But the intensity with which a two or three-year old attacks the <i>organization</i> of language shows that they really are developing a system, a machinery, an explanation for everything that happens. If there is such a thing as a "deep structure", native speakers ought to be able to say, basically, yes, that makes sense, that's how I do it, and that's how I've always done it. <i>Yes indeed, that's the system I used to explain it and set up my own language production machinery</i>.
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Now I find that when Chomsky starts talking about deep structure, and c-command and hierarchical structure of language, he's already losing me. I'm not convinced that those trees adequately or clearly represent what is going on in my head or that of others. If there is a <i>universal grammar</i> that is calling the shots or determining how this system works, I have trouble seeing the separation of <i>universal restrictions</i> from <i>local parameters</i> that determine things such as, where do we put the preposition, or how do we show singular/plural in this particular construction. Chomsky has been unable to convince me that there is <i>anything</i> universal in the series of processes I use to construct a sentence.
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Chomsky's whole point was, having postulated this universal set of rules or restrictions on <i>all language learners everywhere</i>, he should be able to show how our common humanity led us to construct things in certain common, universal ways. It seems to me that if we had found any of these, we would have been able to recognize them, and say something to the effect that, yes, that makes sense, I con see why that would be true for everyone. When I say that grammar has to be <i>learnable</i> and <i>understandable</i>, I think you should say, yes, that makes sense, if a culture is going to pawn this system off on many generations in a row, and expect them to grow up and use this language in this group to function and get what they want, then their grammar is going to have to be <i>learnable</i> and <i>understandable</i>, or else their system is not going to hold up over time. And you should recognize this and realize that, yes, no matter what language you grow up in, generally you can learn that language, and function in it, and the progression where you listen for a year or two, and you start speaking, and pretty soon you're making whole sentences: this progression is about the same, no matter what language you're born into. And you don't have to be a genius to become reasonably fluent in your first language, in a reasonably short period of time, with a working system that constructs verbs correctly, and puts prepositions in the right place, etc.
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Now there are a number of things that I often say about this process, and I've noticed which ones resonate and which ones are going to be a little tougher to prove, because they are not so obvious. Let's play along as I start with the easier stuff. To me it's all an open question but I have no doubt about what I've written so far, and I'm willing to accept arguments about virtually everything. OK, here's the first. Children make hypotheses about how things work, and they actually test out the data (what they hear) against the system as they understand it, in order to come up with the best possible working explanation for how things are. Therefore language is, to them and to all of us native speakers, a system of best-possible-explanations for how things are made and how they are done. Our system can be described partly like this: "We start out with a subject...the subject is generally a noun and is marked as a noun....it hcan have several words but if it does, a determiner comes first and all adjectives come before the noun...adjectives are words that describe nouns...then, you have a verb...generally sentences have subjects and verbs...generally you mark both subject and verb as matching each other...
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Now you may find fault with my system as I've begun to construct it, and you can certainly find exceptions, for example sentences that don't have a subject, or sentences in which some verb acts as a subject. But my point is this. My system as I construct it <i>should make sense to the vast majority of native-speaker-readers</i>, most of whom should <i>recognize the machinery of their own system</i> in the words I've used to describe it. They should be able to recognize fundamental truths of <i>our system</i> (like determiners, articles, subject-verb matching) though they may use different words for them or understand them slightly differently. The biggest difference between different speakers of the same language will be in <i>relative importance</I> of different rules in constructing a language; you will often understand something I say, yet disagree about <i>when</i> it should be said or <i>how important</i> it is in the grand scheme of constructing this language.
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But in any case it will resonate with you at every step of the way, and you should find yourself agreeing by saying, yes, that explains why we do what we do. And the question is, why do we do it this way? And my main point is, the answer, "because all humans do it this way every time" has not proven to pan out very well, whereas the answer "because we in our community have done it this way for years, and taught our children to do it this way" is a far more accurate explanation, in almost every case.
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Now, if linguists can stick to this principle - that what we explain should <i>always make sense to native speakers</i>, then, we can stay true to the science of what we are doing, and also stay true to the fundamental purpose of linguistics, which is to explain why people use language in certain patterns and why science can explain changes in these patterns over time. We can say that there is a reason for observable human behavior and that all of us, native speakers of a language, have similar or common understandings or perceptions of how things are done. We can, finally, I hope, find out what is truly universal in this set of sets of rules, and know when we recognize it: something that all people, everywhere, do, because they are people. If there's something universal, let's find it, identify it, put it on the table. Because it matters, and because, finally, Chomsky and his followers will back off.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-78963871828886126762012-12-13T12:24:00.002-08:002012-12-13T13:09:02.981-08:00Occam's razor and the point shaversOne of the points I've been mulling over from the Honda book is the assertion that Occam's razor (the principle of parsimony) would dictate that remembering two rules, say A & B, is harder and more complex than remembering the choice between those rules, A OR B. Thus, it would be more parsimonious to posit<br><br>
1. <i>John gave to Mary the book</i><br><br>
as opposed to
2. <i>John gave the book to Mary</i><br><br>
ss the underlying structure of<br><br>
3a. <i>John gave the book to Mary</i> and 3b. <i>John gave Mary the book</i>.<br><br>
To get from #1 to the first sentence, you would delete "to"; to get to the second you'd move the prepositional phrase. Thus you have A OR B which Honda posits as parsimonious. However, to get from #2 to the first sentence, you'd do nothing, but to get to the second, you'd have to move the phrase forward AND delete the "to". Thus the second rule has <i>more complexity?</i><br><br>
At first my take on this was to wonder who said there's an underlying structure in the first place? Or, that the underlying structure itself has any order? When I was in graduate school we had this idea of <i>marked/unmarked</i> which didn't quite explain everything but we'd use it in a case like this: When the indirect object is right up against the verb, it must be <i>marked</i>, and it's marked by <i>not having</i> its preposition. OK, so it's like a sign of a specially marked indirect object.
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Honda kind of flies through this without much soul-searching or discussion, but to me it brings up the heart of the problem: how do we explain the internal workings of our minds in the simplest way possible? We native speakers hear such sentences every day and have representations of these rules (transformations, allegedly) in our minds.
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My students were of no help in the matter. They stared at me blankly when I told them that 3a. and 3b. were legitimate sentences in English; that we consider them both grammatical; that linguists would like to explain their relationship and explain the rules we native speakers use to get from 3a. to 3b., or from the underlying structure to each of them. They had no problem with the idea of "direct object" and "indirect object" which some had heard of, vaguely, at some time in their past. They really <i>really</i> didn't know which would be more parsimonious.
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My second reaction is that any time you have A AND B, you have to possibility of bundling them, and saying something to the effect that, "any time you do this, you have to do these," putting A and B together, and remembering them together as basically one rule, one move. Remembering two rules AND remembering to choose one or the other but not both, seems to me more complex, and requires that you separate them out in your mind, and keep them separate. Oh bother!
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What might be required here is a closer look at what the rule of parsimony really entails. I think that almost all linguists buy into the idea of Occam's razor to begin with; that's because, with language having as many rules as it does, everyone has to grab and remember them as well as possible, and what can't be remembered, doesn't survive. However you represent what is happening in our minds, it has to ring true with us; it has to make us say, "that's what I do, I've been doing that all along."
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Now my students, as I said, were of no help here. They don't know what they've been doing all along, and they're not sure if "transformations" or "movement" is a fair representation of what is happening. Finally I challenged them: You tell me what is happening (I said). If you don't like Honda's explanation, find a better one! (silence again).
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Two issues came up repeatedly. One was Chomsky's claim of hierarchical structure of trees. Thus we have trees which represent the underlying structure of the sentences we produce, and moving a prepositional phrase such as "to Mary" to the end of a sentence would allegedly move it to a higher node, thus would align with a generalization that all transformation moves things to a higher node (I have come to align this general rule with the rule about kittens and Christmas ornaments) - but, I don't really agree with this for several reasons. First, it seems that maintaining this theory would cause trouble with other structures, most notably passive (<i>John kissed Mary</i> becomes <i>Mary was kissed by John</i>) - in which you would have to go out of your way to posit underlying structures with nodes that were somehow <i>lower</i> than places where these structures would end up. But second, what justification is there for calling the whole picture hierarchical? None. I don't feel, deep in the quiet center of my mind, the need to take any language I hear and construct my understanding of it in a hierarchical way.
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Now mind you, we construct most things in heirarchical ways. When we see a group of people, we try to figure out who their leader is. When we see trees, we say, it's a <i>kind of elm</i>, and elm is a <i>kind of shade tree</i>, etc. <i>People</i> have constructed hierarchies and have constructed hierarchies in our understanding of the universe, especially for other things we don't understand. But that doesn't mean that nature constructed them. Or that we, in our inner minds, constructed what we heard as <i>hierarchical in nature</i>.
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So I would not be surprised that people <i>believe</i> that the structure of language is hierarchical in nature, and that they <i>believe Chomsky</i> when he claims that such hierarchy-based transformations make up what we do and understand as language; Chomsky has had a good run with this. But my question remains: what is parsimonious? What is the <i>way</i> that most people will <i>remember</i> this stuff?tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-68602374158265441272012-12-07T10:06:00.000-08:002012-12-07T10:16:26.575-08:00Chomsky who mentioned?I've just finished teaching Anthropological Linguistics, 3305, here in Texas, and it was kind of a review for me of what has happened over thirty years in the field of linguistics, based mainly on a book:
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Honda, M. and O'Neil, W. (2008). <i>Thinking Linguistically</i>. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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(there was another book, but I'll say more about that later). This book was very well done in many ways, and it trained students to think linguistically (as promised), making hypotheses about how languages work and then testing them out. It also repeatedly brought up Chomsky's ideas and in many cases presented them as standard; in some ways it was the Chomskian <i>language</i> that irritated me more than the theories themselves, which as far as I am concerned are as good as any others in the open marketplace, until disproven.
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My real bone to pick with Chomsky is this. It's ok to talk about universals, and human universals in language, since there probably are some, and in fact they could be universal to all symbol-producing animals but even then we'd want to know about them. What bothers me is the representation of them as <i>restrictions</i>, and worse yet, as restrictions that <i>we have access to</i>, as if it made a difference whether we could reach them or not. If they are universal, access is not an issue; but, even if it were, it makes it sound like we check with the rule book quickly before we do a transformation or create a question in our minds. And that that rule book is either right there on the seat next to us, or, in some limited cases, we don't have access.
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The last section we did was about making questions, specifically WH-questions of the form, <i>Where did he go? Whose car did he take to Chicago? Why did he go to Chicago?</i> etc. These are quite complex and involve auxiliary movement (creating the <i>do</i>, moving it to the front); WH- movement (in some cases moving the entire noun phrase, as in <i>whose car</i>); adding upward intonation at the end, etc. The recognition that the intonation is a key aspect of the creation of a question is monumental since it implies correctly that <i>grammar is only part of the story</i> and that any given message is actually conveyed through the combination of grammar and other <i>crucial</i> elements. This quote is interesting: "languages form questions in structurally different ways, but Universal Grammar (UG) allows only a small number of structurally different ways." (p. 136). This is typical of the check-with-the-rulebook mentality; it's basically negative.
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In fact in English you have several interesting variations on the above questions. One is using <i>only intonation</i> but using <i>absolutely no other transformations or grammatical cues</i>. That would look like this:<br>
<i>He went to Chicago?</i><br>
Now this question is <i>marked</i>; we could say that it's a special kind of question, confirmatory perhaps, but clearly a non-standard variety. Nevertheless, <i>it's valid; people do it; they mark questions with intonation only</i>. Similarly, there is the following:<br>
<i>He went WHERE?</i><br>
which follows some of the rules (putting the WH- into the right slot, for example) but ignoring the others (creating an AUX, moving the AUX, moving the WH-). What's up with taking or leaving these <i>obligatory</i> rules? Here again, this is a special question, one that has the question intonation, but not the question order; one that emphasizes the <i>where</i> in a special way; one that is clearly non-standard, untypical. But it wouldn't be considered <i>ungrammatical</i> in the same way this one would:<br>
<i>Whose did he take car to Chicago?</i><br>
Here, you see, we are taking and leaving rules, and it's <i>not working</i>.<br>
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It occurs to me, after all this discussion, and going on and on about it with my students, who speak fluent English but don't have a clue about the inner workings of their own language production facility, that we should consider a number of possibilities in order to adequately explain the inner workings of our production systems. Those would be the following:
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It seems fair to assume that questions <i>derive</i> from base structures, that questions are related to the declarative statements that are their answers, and that these transformations from base form to surface form do not change meaning. OK. But what if the question itself is the base form? Or <b>the base form is simply the parts, and both question and declarative sentence are surface realizations</b>? What if the AUX is there in the base form, for both declarative sentence and question (Or, for yet another variety, the tag, <i>He went to Chicago, didn't he?</i>, which seems intuitively to show that this AUX + V is readily available to us for every structure, and doesn't have to be created by a lengthy, distorted process unless we are truly a second-language learner and have no concept of how to use these effectively). My suggestion: We start out with the parts: SUBJ, AUX + V, TIME; we put them together; <i>all the forms</i> are derived from the parts.
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<b>It's not necessarily hierarchical.</b> Honda makes a big deal of how all transformations move things to a higher node. With my students I compared this to moving Christmas tree ornaments to a higher branch (to keep them away from the kitty). You may be surprised by a "religious" reference in class but it really wasn't intended that way. What I was getting at was that Honda infers that, if all transformations move things <i>up</i>, then we have found a universal tendency in our hierarchical minds, and we can thus explain language behavior in millions of other places in the same way. But when we transform <i>I broke the lamp</i> to <i>The lamp was broken by me</i>, we have in effect moved something <i>down</i>, and my guess is that this isn't the only time. Now I'm sure Chomsky would come in with all guns loaded; he knows grammar better than anyone, and can explain reasonably well why <i>anything</i> has an exception. But we are trying to explain how humans set up an inner mechanism to explain and produce language that others will understand. Is there a <i>reason</i> it has to be hierarchical? I don't think so.
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On the contrary; I think there is a <i>hierarchy of salience</i> which is to say, things are easier to notice at the beginning or the end of an utterance, so things go there that we need to show others. Or, <i>s</i> is more salient than <i>p,</i> so <i>s</i> is more likely to be a grammatical marker. These are natural hierarchies. Nature makes some things stronger, some weaker, some more salient, etc. But the human mind: does it make things like a tree, because it has a need to organize information in a hierarchical manner? I don't think so. I think there is <i>nothing about language itself</i> that is necessarily hierarchical, though with some languages, you can see it that way, if you so choose.
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Chomsky's characterizing our internal mechanisms for understanding language structures hierarchically, I believe, sets up an unnecessary complication in a picture that is complicated enough already. Looking at it negatively, with a constant idea of restriction, you end up, as Honda did, saying that all languages must have noun phrases (for example), must have plural, must express plural at the noun phrase level, and must express it in one of several ways. But in fact Honda tells us, later in the book, that some (in particular Western Apache) express plurality in the verb. I believe that some in fact don't even have subjects (or, having expressed a <i>topic</i>, or having one understood, they don't generally <i>need</i> one, so that, grammatically, it is so often gone as to be insignificant). The wide variety of things that in fact <i>do</i> happen leads us to the following conclusion: if UG were to be the binding fence that contains everything we see, it must be a very wide, or useless fence, full of holes. In my mind there's still little benefit to positing a rule book that is by your side at every moment, and saying that we all have "access" to UG. Why not just say we tend to do things for positive reasons; we perceive a large number of things as <i>possible</i> but <i>too much trouble</i>; the main binding fence keeping us from doing all this vast number of things is simply <i>our own laziness</i> and desire to limit the new things we have to master in order to survive. We have a language; it works fine for us; we naturally assume that they all are like ours, and, when they're not, we're surprised, but, basically, we adjust and survive. Let's stick with what we <i>know happens</i>.
tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-57206975800700708142012-11-21T17:17:00.001-08:002012-11-21T18:00:41.649-08:00spanglish, espanglish, etc.Otheguy, R. and N. Stern. (2010, Nov.) <a href="http://ijb.sagepub.com/content/15/1/85.abstract">On So-called Spanglish</a>. CUNY.<br>
We shouldn't use the term "Spanglish" because it robs North American Hispanics of the feeling of having their own language. What they have is a North American version of Spanish, and is a complete language. <br>
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Rosa Maria Jimenez, <a href="http://prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu/past/1995-1996/201cspanglish201d-the-language-of-chicanos">“SPANGLISH”: THE LANGUAGE OF CHICANOS</a>. UC Davis. <br>
Code-switching gives us a feeling of control over two worlds which we are caught between, to some extent, not fully accepted in the US, no longer completely Mexican either. <br>
Code-switching takes skill; you can't just jumble the languages together. Certain combinations sound definitely wrong. Though code-switchers cannot verbalize the rules necessarily, they know the rules, because they can tell you which combinations are wrong. <br>
"I must clarify that code-switchers usually are individuals who learn English out of necessity and not by choice. According to Valdés-Fallis, people who master a second language in an academic setting choose to become bilingual, but rarely will they code-switch. Social, cultural, and political purpose are essential to Spanglish. In general, non-Latino bilinguals will interact in either Spanish or English for different situations. In contrast, “natural” bilingualism will occur at those times when the speakers’ first language will not meet all their communicative needs” (Valdés-Fallis 3)." (Valdés-Fallis, Guadalupe. “Theory and Practice: Code-switching and the Classroom Teacher.” Language in Education. Virginia: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1978.)
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanglish">Spanglish</a> (Wikipedia)
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Salvador Tio, Puerto Rican linguist, was credited with naming "Spanglish"...Tio does not have a Wikipedia page yet.<br>
Spanglish is common in the following places: Panama, Belize, Texas/Mexico, California/Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, New York (Nuyorican), Florida (Cuban/English), Atlanta, New Jersey, Chicago, Gibraltar. <br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0371246/">Spanglish</a> the movie
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal%C3%B3_%28Chicano%29">Calo</a>, a special language<br><br>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanito">Llanito</a>, spoken in Gibraltar<br><br>tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-55431659775329109452012-10-26T18:23:00.001-07:002012-10-26T18:23:25.351-07:00I'm really enjoying teaching linguistics, partly because I get to revisit Saussure, Boas, and all these old historical characters. Today for example we reviewed Boas and went on to Sapir and Whorf, and what happened after them.
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But I came to this one little segment of a chapter called "Relativism and Enactionism." I read it a few times before I realized I was onto something. But then, I googled "enactionism" and Google put me <i>directly</i> onto enactivism.
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I read and reread Enactivism until I determined that they were talking about the same movement as the one the book had; it had the same people, same basic idea. They also mentioned Universal Darwinism and other biologically-based theories of cognition.
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My book, <i>Anthropological Linguistics</i> by Foley, was published in 1997 and has been reprinted several times. I had a hard time believing this was just a typo, this idea of Enactionism. But Enactionism got <i>no hits</i>. Either they let the typo go because they didn't care, or didn't know, or whatever. It's somewhat surprising. It's like purposely misspelling someone's name to subvert the possibility that it could ever get any more famous.
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Back in the 90's I found a friend poring over this movement. Back in those days people depended on these list-serves, where people of like interests would share comments and get involved in huge discussions. This is a group, he said, that was interested in the power of perception as the center, as an important force in making the world what it is. To learn about it, he said, write an e-mail joining the group. They will send you a great introductory piece that will explain it. But then, he said, get off the list immediately, or you will be flooded for days with thousands of e-mails.
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I can't remember if I followed his advice or not. The movement, which posits that humans and the environment interact, develop together in sensitivity to each other, is difficult to grasp, or more of it would have stuck with me. I'm more interested in that now, because I believe in a Darwinist interpretation of the self-organized system of language. What are the little actors, that have within them the capacity to adjust, to adapt, to change? Human perception is at the center of this. It's true that it's the words, the pieces, the structures, etc., that live or die, let the strongest survive. But it's the human perception that gives them their strength, that either values them and uses them, or doesn't value them and lets them rot on the vine. It's my job to put this together somehow and explain it. I'm still mulling over how. tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-57925313015705985842012-09-28T19:31:00.002-07:002012-09-28T19:31:42.670-07:00prescriptive grammarOne question on the test had to do with linguists' attitude toward prescriptive grammar. As an answer on the test, many students said that linguists don't care for it. It constrains us or keeps us from saying what we want, one student said. No, finally I stomped my foot and said, linguists have been maligned on this issue and I won't tolerate it.
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In fact the mainstream media got the idea a little while back, and they were right about this, that linguists as a class disdain prescriptive grammar and the people who would try to impose rules on a language, and tell us all what's grammatical and what's not. This is hypocritical, critics said, because linguists are educated and write in good grammar, and can afford to make an argument that prescriptive grammar is useless. To the rest of us, it's a power-laden world where bad grammar is judged poorly.
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This is why they miss the point. Linguists try to explain human behavior. Prescriptive rules sometimes help us explain what we try to do, say, when we write a paper. But they don't explain what we do the rest of the time. I gave as an example, the rules of "y'all" (which I am studying)...these are not prescriptive. Yet there <i>are</i> rules, and we follow them, and learning the rules will help linguists understand and explain human behavior.
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Finally I told the story of the three girls with three violins in the monsoon in Korea. Three girls, three violins, one umbrella, and nobody got wet. I saw that and said, Americans could never do this; they can't work in such close harmony with anyone. Then one day, on Lake Shore Drive, in Chicago, I saw six lanes of traffic, all going 75 MPH, all bumper-to-bumper, for sixty miles into the city. My knuckles turned white while I stuck with them and stayed bumper-to-bumper the whole way. So, finally, I wanted to know how people could be in such incredible harmony; I decided we were acting like the girls with the violins.
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But I also realized that the speed limit was 55. It had nothing to do with the speed limit. It happened at 7 am, and I don't think anyone seriously thought they'd be pulled over. Every single driver was acting in his/her own best interest, including me. and pushing it to the max, which was about 75. And not budging from that maximal rate. The law, like prescriptive grammar, can explain some of our behavior some of the time, and it can attempt to enforce what we all recognize as "the rules"...but other times, what happens follows its own rules.
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In the end, linguists consider prescriptive grammar to be an interesting player in the game, but we can't confuse "the rules" with "everyone's rules" or "the reason you just did what you did". In short, prescriptive grammar doesn't <i>explain</i> human behavior as much as it tries to <i>control</i> it, and linguists will be the first to tell y'all, control doesn't always work.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-89742083991369057072012-09-28T19:19:00.002-07:002012-09-28T19:19:21.272-07:00sound changeThe return of the test today caused a bit of a stir. It came down to what really causes great sound changes like the Great Vowel Shift. I told the truth as I knew it - that nobody really knows why all English's vowels shifted sometime between 1400 - 1700. There are dozens of theories.
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Several things are notable about the era. People moved to southeast England from all over the country, to escape the black plague. There was a lot of social mobility for the same reason. The aristocracy who had spoken French for years started speaking English again. But people who wanted to move up spoke like them. During one of the many wars between France and England, it became a bad idea to sound too French, and people tried to sound more British. etc. etc.
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The question comes up because of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and whether that is an entire language shift, or just the creation of a dialect. In the case of the NCVS, which is happening now, almost nobody is even aware of it; it is surely not happening for social reasons. I can see people changing their vowels to be similar to those around them (I am doing it as we speak), but, there is no social prestige involved in this particular shift, that I know of. I presented it to my class. Why do people do it? I don't know.
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This is the story I present to them. We as linguists try to explain human behavior, and humans are indeed doing things that surprise us, defy explanation. The introduction of a new language would seem to tax people, give them too many rules to remember, stretch their possible number of vowels, etc. But why would this happen in the North before it happened in Texas? Or, why would Canadians refuse to budge or change anything? Because these are geographical questions, my interest is piqued. But I don't really have answers. More about this later, I hope.
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tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-81756987314851973892012-09-13T20:59:00.000-07:002012-09-13T20:59:11.694-07:00my friend JessiJessi spent days up in this little office in our linguistics hallway (this was back before I retired from Southern Illinois University) listening to people make the sound -l. L as in <i>little</i>. Now <i>little</i> has two l's, the first one being what you'd call <i>light</i>, and the last one being what you'd call <i>dark</i>. My present linguistics book, by the way, ignores this distinction. Maybe it's because it doesn't matter any more, I'm not sure. What Jessi found was that people make all kinds. Some make all light, some make all dark, some have their own kind. I find this interesting and I look forward to hearing more about it (she will send me her paper, she's promised).
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She found out a lot of things. It's kind of like court reporting. Once you train your ear, and by discipline or whatever, try to become very objective, you'll notice that you become better at just recording <i>what exactly you heard</i>, as opposed to what you expected, or what somebody said you'd hear, or whatever. And there really is an incredible variety out there in what people say and do.
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I've been pressing Jessi on a single question that is on my mind, and it's possible she won't be able to answer it based on the work she's done, which really focused on -l, and not the vowels. The question is this: there is no doubt that there is a vowel shift happening in the northern cities (called the <i>Northern Cities Vowel Shift</i>), and that young people, women first, are changing and moving a whole set of vowels around in their mouths. My primary example is <i>thank you</i> which is coming out more and more sounding like <i>think you</i> or at least <i>thenk you</i>. In other words, it's moving way up. Now <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_cities_vowel_shift">Wikipedia</a> does not consider this a dialect, although it is a whole system of shifts that are happening and have been happening since the 60's. They maintain that Canadians are not taking it up, and that though it has moved down to St. Louis, it hasn't gone much further west than say Cedar Rapids or central Minnesota. So what's up? Is it a dialect? Is it a great change that's happening in our midst like the great vowel shift of the 1600's?
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Some research has been done about the reasons for the Great Vowel Shift in the 1600's. Actually it happened any time between 1300 and maybe 1650, who knows? And all kinds of things were happening then: plague was wiping out all classes; people were moving around; the aristocracy was returning to English after speaking French for a while; people were practicing social mobility for the first time ever. Also, they were beginning to solidify and standardize the writing system, which meant that words that <i>didn't make</i> the shift got left behind in a very visible way; their spelling became irregular.
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Now my questions may be obvious. Are all sound changes dictated by social movement? (If so <i>what is up with those northern girls?</i>....) Is it possible that whole populations change their vowels <i>without being aware of it?</i> What role does hypercorrection play in this picture?
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All good questions, which I will return to later, I'm sure.
tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-69378928251867724852012-09-13T20:21:00.000-07:002012-09-13T20:22:53.115-07:00linguistics reportI'm surprised by how much linguistics has changed in the years since I studied it most intently, namely the early eighties. I should not be surprised that Chomsky still dominates the field. The Anthropological Linguistics text I'm using was actually written in the late nineties and has Chomsky all over it, but my impression has been that the last twenty years have been a kind of contest, in which Chomsky still maintains what is left of linguistic universals, and language hunters go out and steadily, one by one, prove them wrong.
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Finally, he was backed into a corner: recursion, or reflexivity, the last of linguistic universals; but, someone proved <i>that</i> wrong...or at least, thought they did.
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Now, I'll admit, I'm sure my version of this story is somewhat cloudy, and that's why I get it out, to help me sort it out in my own mind. For one thing, I notice <i>recursion</i> and <i>reflexivity</i> being used interchangeably, and I'm not totally comfortable with that. It's my understanding that <i>reflexivity</i> is when an object refers back to a subject (<i>he washed himself</i>) whereas <i>recursion</i> is a little wider, and deals with all self reference, from <i>he gave his horse and car to John and Paul, respectively</i> to <i>he is the man whom I saw yesterday</i>. I'll admit that I have no idea what Chomsky actually claimed in his final theory, or whether the language hunters of the <i>Piraha</i> actually proved that there is a language that does not do this. I base my knowledge on a single article, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto">The Interpreter</a>, that caught my fancy and proved to me that Chomsky was not really, in fact, indestructible. Yet he has totally dominated the field for what, sixty years now.
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The way our book describes and distributes sounds is somewhat different from the way we used to. Some features, such as <i>fricative, labial, dental-fricative, etc.</i> seem to be gone. Are they unnecessary? I find myself impatient with the binary nature of features, also. If the entire universe is binary, then it's necessary to label an -h- as either sonorant or non-sonorant, whereas that probably doesn't matter to the person who is actually picking up or interpreting the sound. I'd like to develop my thinking on this topic a bit, but it seems that a lot of the work that has gone into describing sounds distinguishes them by how they are made, and I can see why; that's what we have, and in many cases that's the most salient thing: they're either <i>voiced or non voiced</i>, <i>continuant or stop</i>, etc. But it's at the receiving end that we must pick up the differences between them and then use them to calculate what we've heard. And our minds are not entirely binary. Our computers are, but our minds aren't. Koreans distinguish three kinds of <i>p</i>, for example: plain, tight, and aspirated. We can describe these in a binary way but it might be simpler if we described them in another way. Once again, it's the receiver, the listener, who has to tell them apart. Our hearing/listening must be as simple, as salient, as possible. Why should we tolerate complexity? We don't have time for it.
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The book leads us through an exercise on the scientific analysis of the sound makeup of English plurals. Words end in -s, -z, or -Iz as in <i>books, dogs/dogz, churches/churchiz</i>. We want to make a rule that explains what native English speakers do based on the sound construction of every word. The book posits a <i>base form</i>. Should that be -s? How about -z? or -Iz? Since we're always spelling it with an -s, that might be a good place to start. But is it? Good question.
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The rule of Occam's razor says, make your explanation as simple as possible. Clean, pure, simple, don't bog down the native speaker with too many rules. OK, I'll buy that. I'll even force it on my students. I'll be happy to. It's tomorrow's lecture.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5085378347168850138.post-57723957457024555012012-07-10T13:34:00.001-07:002012-07-10T13:41:12.983-07:00Leverett, T. (2012). <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b7ibffTbB-gDGmJJnCUtclUZrjFE71T1lqL9XmQysLw/edit">Saussure and the Oral-writing relationship</a>. Google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b7ibffTbB-gDGmJJnCUtclUZrjFE71T1lqL9XmQysLw/edit.
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Leverett, T. (2012). <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xnyTaAIqY5necN8WeXL5nnebYEc3h4ihL-sFP-yuxtg/edit">Koutsoudas' first principle</a>. Unpublished document. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xnyTaAIqY5necN8WeXL5nnebYEc3h4ihL-sFP-yuxtg/edit.
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Leverett, T. (2012). <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/13rmxVLpnx3-6A7Kz4FqY9ylX7yxHTL7p_ReWJluso5M/edit">Symbols and the language learner</a>. Unpublished document. https://docs.google.com/document/d/13rmxVLpnx3-6A7Kz4FqY9ylX7yxHTL7p_ReWJluso5M/edit.
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Cleaning out files as I move to Lubbock, TX later this month. I am still unclear about using Google Docs; I enjoy putting these things on google docs, but I really have no idea how they look to others, or whether you use the same "edit" URL that I have, as an editor. What do you see? Is it decent? I'm not even sure it's the same as what I see.
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I'll further admit that they are not really in order; I have lost track of the book nature of what I was writing, and am now just trying <i>not</i> to lose stuff. On this blog, at least so I hope, I won't lose it.
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The third article, though it's marked 2012, was written on the old Word, and I believe was on the old computer; I'm not sure <i>when</i> I wrote it. Let's just say, this blog is the most permanent place to store stuff like this, computers come & go, but the blog stays, with its sleepy organization by month. These, I guess, will remain as July 2012.tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17510928206528498553noreply@blogger.com0