Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

So, I have already hit a snag in one of the three final papers I need to write. One of them is due in 10 days, and has to be 20 pages. That’s two pages a day. Crap.

I will take this time to briefly discuss a talk in the linguistics department colloquium yesterday featuring David Eddington. Eddington spoke about the scientific method in linguistics. His claim is that experiments are necessary to establish the psychological reality of linguistic elements. I agree with him, but too many of his claims were either too strong or based on a misunderstanding or misapplication of the theoretical and philosophical work in linguistics. The talk culminated in a claim that formal analysis is inherently non-empirical, and therefore unscientific.

For example, he misunderstands what Chomsky’s Ideal Speaker-Listener model is, and what it means. Somehow in the last week, I have become a staunch supporter of Chomskyan linguistics, and it’s really uncomfortable. Eddington is under the assumption that since the Ideal Speaker-Listener doesn’t exist, then it’s a useless construct, missing entirely that the I-model is a metaphor for a set of assumptions about linguistic knowledge humans possess. Eddington would have us throw it out entirely, rather than analyze the assumption in light of new data and experiments. His idea is to short circuit cognitive science.

Perhaps more troubling was his claim that lingusitics can only be scientific when it models linguistic processing or production. Analyses of linguistic structure (whether surface or deep) falls within the realm of mathematics, ethics, and virtue. I would counter that if we have data and evidence that leads us to be able to make an inference about linguistic structure, we have done something scientific and falsifiable.

I am that end of having a cold where you feel okay for the most part. The only remnant of it is the 80 cubic feet of mucus in your head that makes you feel like you’re blowing your brain out when you blow your nose. Also, I hate doing group work.

Anyway, can anybody guess what I am summing up here? I’m too tired and lazy to type it myself, so I cut and pasted this from somewhere else.

· There are patterns in all natural languages (i.e. human languages) that cannot be learned by children using positive evidence alone. Positive evidence is the set of grammatical sentences the language learner has access to, that is, by observing the speech of others. Negative evidence, on the other hand, is the evidence available to the language learner about what is not grammatical. For instance, when a parent corrects a child’s speech, the child acquires negative evidence.

· Children are only ever presented with positive evidence for these particular patterns. For example, they only hear others speaking using sentences that are “right”, not those that are “wrong”.

· Children do learn the correct grammars for their native languages.

That’s right, it’s the age-old epistemological problem linguists face, poverty of the stimulus, claiming that Language is unlearnable for children given the lack of evidence presented to them during the acquisition phase, thus it is evidence for some kind of linguistic nativism.

The validity of the argument isn’t debated. The conclusions of it, however, are contested in some far reaching, dark, undiscovered corners of linguistics and cognitive science. Those who accept poverty of the stimulus as evidence of nativism cite human Language’s recursive nature. That is, a grammar can generate a sentence to infinity, and still be grammatical. Therefore, language is unlearnable. Evidence cited for the second premise is Subject-AUX inversion. Since I don’t feel like explaining what that is, let’s simplify/straw-man it and say that children only hear correct evidence of how to do it (”You can come to my house, Can you come to my house?”). The third piece of evidence cited is that children ultimately learn the correct grammar of their language.

I have problems with all of these. First, I don’t see how we can say language is truly recursive. I can say things like, “The cat is in on the couch, in the house, on the street, …” ad infinitum, but ultimately you wouldn’t be able to handle information. It is thus ungrammatical (or at least irrelevant to grammar). Chomsky would argue that this has to do with limited memory capacity in our brains to handle infinitely generated sentences. If this is the case, and with language being for communicative purposes, it’s still illogical to claim that infinitely recursive sentences are grammatical. Besides, when do children ever hear these? lolchomsky

The subject-AUX inversion claim, that children only ever hear the correct production of it, is also problematic. People makes slips of the tongue all the time. Children hear their parents make performance errors all the time, but they hear more correct forms. Stochastic learning, maybe?

Finally, children all learn a grammar, but we also know that each individual speaker of language X’s grammar is different from another’s. Okay, I’m actually tired of talking about this.

I other news, I’ve decided on my research project for phonetics: attention paid by non-Arabic speakers to vowels preceding pharyngeals. You know, seeing how well they pick up on contrast from transitions into following consonants. Also, I started playing the EVE Online. The world’s prettiest spreadsheet. Someday I will blog on that.

I find it terribly ironic when fan clubs devoted to Sam Harris pop up on Facebook. A group of followers of an atheist thinker to gather and rally against theism with evangelical zeal seems remarkably odd to me. One of the discussions in the Facebook group I linked to I found particularly interesting. The thread is entitled, “Harris vs. Dawkins.” The first paragraph of the first post reads:

While Dawkins has impressive credentials (with his seat at Oxford), his most recent book The God Delusion falls down hard when making coherant [sic] arguments against the faithful. While I respect the mans effort in organizing the non-religious (especially atheists) politically, his most recent work is just not as intellectually robust as Harris’s The End of Faith.

When I read this paragraph, I don’t see a reasoned discussion about the arguments made by Sam Harris as opposed to Richard Dawkins. What I see is a discussion about the comparative writing and reasoning ability of the two men. This is the way critics write (I am writing as a critic now). This is also the way competing religious polemicists write. I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if their dream came true.

There is an old saying: the masses are asses. If you have a group of, say, one hundred people off the streets, I would wager that five to ten are capable of leading intellectually. The other ninety would only be capable of following. The followers become the most zealous. This is the way religions progress within fifty years of their founding, and is the way secular movements are prone to develop. Honestly, religion may be baloney (I personally believe it has plenty to offer), but it is baloney with a future. It can be seen in the way opponents of religion need their own organizations to counter it. Perhaps dogmatism aids in perpetuating the species.

In other news, I was thinking about game theory applied to player-versus-player combat in MMOs while driving between Huntsville and Salt Lake. There is a great debate among the player-bases of these games about survivability and damage dealing. For example, the mage (an offensive spell caster) class in World of Warcraft has, hands down, the lowest survivability in the game, and should be able to trade survivability for the ability to introduce other players to a world of pain. In reality, the mage class is gimped. Other classes can put out comparable or more damage but have far greater survivability and utility. Players who roll mage like to cry about this, really, it isn’t that big of a problem.

There is a concept called first-mover advantage. In PVP, this can be interpreted that in world play (as opposed to controlled battleground play), your chances of victory (here defined as reducing your opponent’s HP to zero while keeping yours greater than zero), all things being equal, are greatly increased if you engage an enemy player. If he engages you, your chance of survival, all things being equal, is greatly decreased. If a mage keeps this in mind, meaning he makes the first move, his survivability is no greater than that of a healing, damage-dealing shadow priest.

Of course, not everything is necessarily equal. The PVP system in WoW is, at least in part, gear based. A well geared player can own another’s face, even if he is taken by surprise. Ganking, or engaging a player while he is engaged in PVE doesn’t really count. The player being ganked stands no chance.

As for a quick update on my summer reading: I am reading through the Lord of the Rings series again. I am about half-way through the second book right now. I am also reading two biographies. On about General William Tecumseh Sherman, and the other about abolitionist John Brown. I am working on my Arabic so I can take the CASA exam for a fellowship in Syria in 2008, and would like to find time to work on some Hebrew. Time time time.

I read over a few Hadiths the other day. One in particular caught my eye. It was given in the context of after Friday prayer, when Muhammad got up to thank everyone for coming, etc. Here it is in Arabic and English:

و حدثني محمد بن رافع و عبد بن حميد قال عبد اخبرنا و قال ابن رافع حدثنا عبد الرزاق اخبرنا معمر عن الزهري عن ابن المسيب عن ابي هريرة قال

قال رسول الله صلى الله عليه و سلم من اكل من هذه الشجرة فلا يقربن مسجدنا ولا يؤذينا بريح الثوم

Translation (excluding all the isnad):

The Prophet (peace be upon him) said, “Whoever ate from this plant [raw onion and garlic and this case] should not approach our mosque, thus harming us with the smell of raw garlic.”

Reading this Hadith was followed by a discussion of the practicality of some Ahadith, compared to the more contemplative nature of others. I mentioned isnad above. Isnad is basically a chain of narrator of Hadith, and was probably brought to the study of Hadith by Jewish converts to Islam.

I have one problem with the above citation:

man akala min haðihi ʃ-ʃajara fala: ya-qrabna masjidana:

Who ate.3MS from this the-plant don’t approach.3FP mosque-our

Whoever ate from this plant, don’t approach our mosque.

I am not sure why the verbs don’t agree. One being 3^rd person masculine singular, the other being 3^rd person feminine plural. If anyone has a clearer understanding of this, let me know.

Anyway, classwork is over, and I am now working on finals. I finished my phonology take-home final, in which all the data is Arabic and Biblical Hebrew (I have this test in the bag), and now have to work on a Syntax take-home, a translation, and a short essay for anthropology. Then, I have a month off. Alhamdulillah.

So, there are still a few little quirks to work out with the transfer. Some things are not lining up properly, but I can fix that in two minutes as soon as I have the will to do so. If you happened to be reading the blog last night between 9:46 PM and 9:50 PM, you would have noticed that the home page had 20 additional posts dated January 1970. This was the result of my attempt to automate the import of my old archives. Unfortunately, I will lose my comments since CuteNews doesn’t keep the comments anywhere near the Really though, the reason why the site is bare again stems more from my incompetence: I don’t know how to send posts to the archive with this new-fangled devilry I am using.

Anyway, I could talk about my boring weekend, but I want talk about second language acquisition instead; primarily what fluency is and how it is achieved. I know for a fact that several people reading my web log are studying or have previously studied a foreign language, but how many of them are fluent? Who knows? I, for one, become rather irritated when people refer to me as the kid fluent in Arabic. I am nowhere near fluency. I haven’t developed what is necessary to achieve fluency in Arabic. To understand fluency, we need to understand linguistic competence.

In a nutshell, linguistic competence is our innate ability to speak and the intuition we have about the language we speak. Naturally, we have an extraordinary intuition about our native language, even if we have never touched a grammar book. Fluency in a foreign language requires a speaker to achieve to some degree a pseudo-competence within the language he or she is learning. I have never taken an L2 acquisition course, but I hypothesize that with Semitic languages, like Arabic and Hebrew, morphology is the primary obstacle to achieving this level of competence.

As native English speakers, we don’t store the word ‘uncomfortable’ in our minds as the word ‘uncomfortable.’ Rather, we store it as three morphemes: ‘un,’ ‘comfort,’ and ‘able.’ When we need to say, “Uncomfortable,” we put the pieces together and spit it out on the fly. A native speaker of Arabic doesn’t store the word ‘maktu:b’ in his head as ‘maktu:b,’ but as the root /ktb/ and the affixes that are attached to it. A student learning Arabic, however, cannot do this in a classroom setting — he has to store the word along with his English lexicon as one word.

In short, how do we achieve the ability to mimic what native speakers do? Live with them. That said, I am thinking I will live in the Middle East for a year or two after I graduate. That’s all I have to say.