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.

In response to Dave’s comment a couple of posts ago, I wish I could say I’m not doing any homework over the break. Unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. I’ve been planning out a follow-up to my phonetics project, which I would like to submit to the Linguistics Student Conference this year. We’ll see maybe. I’ve also been reading a lot of Chomsky and anti-Chomsky (mostly regarding the argument from the poverty of the stimulus). I guess you could say I feel stupid remaining completely agnostic about the idea that has shaped the foundation of modern theoretical linguistics, and I’m trying to be convinced one way or the other. I don’t work that way, it seems. Saying I am agnostic concerning Universal Grammar is like an physicist taking the same stance toward General Relativity. More on that in a moment.

It turns out that my sociolinguistics professor hasn’t yet posted our grades. They were due yesterday. This normally wouldn’t be a concern to me, since delayed grades are known to happen, but she hasn’t sent my letter of recommendation either. I am wondering if she is, you know, dead. If she’s dead, that sucks. You know what also sucks? Potentially being stuck in Salt Lake another year. Maybe I can make the best of it. I’ll just get another degree, or something. Hell, maybe I’ll get a real job in the interim.

Anyway, UG. Arguments for it have been entirely philosophical for decades now. It’s become accepted as a truth about human existence without any robust empirical investigation into its premises. Pullum and Scholz wrote a striking critique of various stimulus poverty arguments. One of the pieces of the classic argument from the poverty of the stimulus is that children cannot acquire various grammatical structures from positive evidence. One such example is subject-AUX inversion:

(1) You can come to my house.

(2) Can you come to my house?

(3) *Can you can come to my house?

Pullum and Scholz claim there are numerous positive examples of this, even in corpora experienced by children during early acquisition. Perhaps a hole has been found. Regardless of what you take away from the [rather lengthy] article, it’s clear that the time for philosophizing about UG, the assumption underlying all generative models of language, is over. Now it’s time for data.

Additionally, there is the case of Pirahã. Daniel Everett claims that this remote language in the Amazon lacks key elements of language which, according to various Chomskyans, are essential to the UG hypothesis. Further, culture he claims that culture constrains Pirahã language and cognition in a way previously unattested. It’s interesting, though I’m not ready to accept it. There has to be a way to judge his hypothesis experimentally. Some have claimed to try, but the Pirahã people seem to be inscrutable.

I am not talking about it here, though.

Interestingly, Sasha’s most recent comment motivated me to write a long response on site, which basically turned into my statement. So, yeah, thanks Sasha.

I guess since I have disappeared for the last little bit, I should give a few quick updates. First, my final list of schools I am applying to is University of Arizona (in Tuscon), University of Washington (in Seattle), UCLA (in…LA), Northwestern University, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Ohio State University (Columbus). Sorry, Emily, but not UT. So, with the application fees and costs of sending transcripts and the cost of the GRE and the extra score reports…roughly 740 USD just for the simple privilege of being considered. Applying to grad school is great.

Planning and carrying out my experiment for advanced phonetics and phonology has become a full-time job for me. I’ve spent most time in the back of the classes I don’t like preparing stimuli and writing the introduction section of the paper. It’s funny I am spending so much time working on it, since it’s doubtful it’s going to be any good (by publication standards). In fact, my professor said as much to us when she assigned it. We’re expected to kind of stumble through it, ask her for help, and continue screwing it up.

I finished Assassin’s Creed over the Thanksgiving break. Wow, that game blew me away. It’s the kind of game that keeps me up the night I finish it researching all the symbolism. Take any Metal Gear Solid story and multiply the weirdness by seven. It was pretty awesome. Maybe I’ll write a review someday. The other game I picked up is Mass Effect. Chances are good that I won’t have the time to play it until the non-denominational-winter-coinciding-with-Christmas break, but when I get a chance to really get into it, I will report. Space opera, ftw.

Anyone living in Utah over the age of 18 who has not taken any Arabic care to be a research subject for me?

There has a been a popular thread on the Utah Masonic Electronic News board the last several days concerning the state of repair (or disrepair) of the Salt Lake Masonic Temple. It was an interesting discussion. I am obviously not the only Mason in the state of Utah who is troubled by how our building falls apart around us. As the thread is private, I won’t mention any specific examples of what was said, but I will paraphrase a little:

· Nothing is getting done. We keep forming exploratory committees and spending money for architectural consulting, but we then ignore anything those committees or consultants say. We create a hell of a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy.

· We point to the big things that have been done, but ignore all of the all of the little things that are adding up, ultimately trumping the fact that we have a new sound board in the auditorium: the paint, the carpet, the electrical system, the walls, the fact that our roof is, as one brother put it, a swimming pool.

This last Friday, I took my mother and my aunt on a tour of the building (maybe someday I will blog about the bureaucracy I had to go through to get that to happen). I couldn’t help but feel slightly embarrassed by the large, gaping holes in the walls, the tattered, faded, and torn carpet. I don’t know what to do. Masons in Utah, especially brothers of the six lodges that meet in the temple, love to point to this building and talk about how great it is that we have it. Strangely, we don’t do anything to improve it. Part of me feels the improvement of the building is beyond our control. We entrust its care to a cold, seemingly heartless entity run by old timers who fail to see the changing local economy and fail to think of creative ways to improve the building. I could talk for hours about the failings of this organization alone. Anyway, sorry for that piece of rambling.

I have started work on the major portion of my two big projects this semester (for phonetics and for sociolinguistics). For phonetics, I am investigating L2 subjects’ perception of foreign contrasts, in this case plain and pharyngealized alveolars in Jordanian Arabic, based on the acoustic cues on the preceding vowel, with the hypothesis that subjects will exploit their knowledge of front and backed vowels to discern the difference.

Strangely, given the fact that sociolinguistics has become the bane of my existence this semester, I am most excited for the project I am doing for that class. I am studying stop insertion in Utah English between nasals and sibilants in an optimality theoretic model similar to Ito and Mester’s lexical stratification. Optimality theory is an interesting model. It has the ability to account for fact about human language that traditionally have been neglected or seen as inconvenient facts. Chief among these, is variation. In this case, stylistic variation, since I can’t think of anything about socioeconomic status or gender or ethnicity that predicts the use of this feature. I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Also, reason seven why I don’t go into any medical field.

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.

A gem from today’s issue of the Salt Lake Deseret Morning Tribune News:

It is hard to find a better example of academic nonsense than the assertion by two linguists (Forum, Sept. 27) that the disappearance of archaic languages is “the most serious crisis facing humanity today.”

Not AIDS, pollution, global warming, terrorists, poverty, disease, or a shrinking water supply is a crisis, but rather the loss of the organized grunts of six savages in Timbuktu threatens mankind.

Like burning witches at the stake, phlogiston and the flat-Earth theory, languages are a cultural artifact, and cultural artifacts disappear because the world is a better place without them. While language is essential to civilization, languages, by promoting tribalism, threaten mankind.

The most successful, most peaceful, periods in history were those where a lingua franca ruled - Latin, Mandarin, and today, English. The only problem with losing a few languages is that it is not enough.

Keith Baker
Heber City

I’ll not get into the…weird things he says in…basically the entire letter. If you’re interested, I commented as Xalil. The letter was in response to a letter written by chair of the University of Utah Linguistics Department, Ed Rubin, and director of the Center for American Indian Languages, Lyle Campbell:

We commend The Tribune for publishing “Thousands of languages on brink of extinction” (Sept. 19) and calling attention to this important issue.

It is widely acknowledged as one of the most serious crises facing humanity today, posing moral, practical and scientific problems of enormous proportions of which most people are unaware. The Center for American Indian Languages (CAIL) and the faculty and students of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah are currently involved in the documentation and revitalization of 10 endangered native languages of the Americas.

For more information on these ongoing projects and on endangered languages of the Americas in general, see www.cail.utah.edu. We hope others will share these concerns and will join us in supporting these efforts.

Ed Rubin
Chair, U. of U.
Department of Linguistics
Lyle Campbell
Director, CAIL
Salt Lake City

Notice where Keith Baker’s letter misquotes the other. Never did Rubin and Campbell say it was the worst crisis. Period. Poverty, crime, and AIDS aren’t problems. They said it was one of the worst crises, for much of the same reason that poverty, crime, and AIDS are on the list. The languages of others, you know, those organized grunts of savages in Timbuktu, are being wiped out along with their cultures. Most of the people affected succumb to poverty, crime, and AIDS. I guess I have trouble believing that a hick living in Heber can feel threatened by indigenous languages.

Wow, I’m updating. I really fear that updating this blog may become a once-a-week affair. That’s no good.

I had to present on an article I read* [which I can't post for copyright reasons] in class. The presentation was supposed to take about an hour, but since I had the shortest article on the list, it ran short. I began to ad-lib, and brought up a question I raised while reading the paper: are phonological features innate or inferred? In other words, are phonological features pre-specified for us by Universal Grammar, or do we figure it out for ourselves by some sort of stochastic learning mechanism? I’m not sure.

The article I read presented experimental evidence in favor of the latter explanation. Infants, being keenly sensitive to phonetic contrast, when exposed to a bimodal distribution of speech sounds discriminate speech sounds better than infants that are exposed to unimodal distributions. That is to say, they better pick up on relevant properties of the different sounds.

On the other hand, when we make vowels, human languages only contrast in tongue height and tongue backness. However, it isn’t physiologically impossible to move our tongue, say, right and left. We just don’t do it for anything involving speech. That could be evidence in favor of innate specification.

As far as Universal Grammar is concerned, I remain agnostic. I see how it can be a useful construct in the realm of syntax, but it seems less relevant to things like phonology, notwithstanding Chomsky’s desire to have a unified theory of syntax and phonology. Syntax and phonology are very different things. Syntax is only concerned with what is happening in the mind of a speaker. Phonology, on the other hand, necessarily interacts with the physical world, for example, the shape of the vocal tract, the construction of the auditory system, and so on. So yeah, big questions.

Also, Eternal Sonata.

Peter Ladefoged and D.E Broadbent conducted an interesting experiment in 1952 examining the effects of previous phonetic context on vowel perception.

Using the Parametric Artificial Talker, Ladefoged and Broadbent synthesized the sentence Please say what this word is and altered the F1 and F2 frequencies across the sentence six times to produce six versions of the sentence, all of which were easily understood. Four test words – A(375, 1700), B(450, 1700), C(575, 1700), D(600, 1300) — were also synthesized, taking the form b[V]t. F1 was incrementally raised across all four words, and F2 was lowered for word D. The authors’ hypothesis was that subjects would identify the ambiguous sounding vowels of the test words based on the previous phonetic context of the introductory sentence.

The subjects (n=60), who were from diverse socio-linguistic backgrounds within the United Kingdom were asked to listen to randomized list of ten test words and asked to check what they thought the word was. In the second part of the experiment, subjects listened the introductory sentences followed by the test words and asked to check what they believed the word was. It was found that the subjects were clearly influenced by the introductory sentence in the second part of the experiment. For example, when 87% of subjects identified word A as bit when it followed version one of the sentence, while 90% identified it as bet when it followed sentence version two in which F1 varies over a lower range, clearly demonstrating the influence of the previous phonetic context on identification of a speaker’s vowels.

Nifty, eh?

There is currently a debate among linguists as to whether linguistics (or, at least theoretical linguistics) can aptly be considered an empirical science, or if it should be classified among non-empirical sciences like formal logic and pure mathematics. The debate has been particularly strong among laboratory phonologists, phoneticians, and psycholinguists. Having become very interested in laboratory phonology, I would contend that linguistics has the potential to be an empirical science. I could write all day about the arguments for and against that proposal, but the real issue behind this [short] update is to indicate to my vast audience whether I would want to be called a scientist or whether I want linguistics to be called a science. In short, the answer is a qualified no, the qualification being that linguistics has the makings of an empirical science. My reasons for this view are, naturally, not based on a solid foundation of reason.

I know scientists. I have friends in the science departments around the country. I know the feelings of other scientists in the positivist and relativist schools of thought, and I can hear the subtle prejudice against behavioral and cognitive sciences in Ira Flatow’s Science Friday (”That’s a claim even a sociologist could make”). The use of the term ‘hard science’ reveals the same prejudicial attitude prevalent among the scientific community. If this  exclusive club can’t accept an important field of inquiry, I am not entirely sure I want to be a part of it.

Lastly, I hate the way science is treated in popular culture. An attentive observer will hear the words ’scientifically proven’ thrown around a lot. People look to science as if it yields answers. It doesn’t; it yields bigger questions (which, of course, I love). If you are looking for answers, turn to philosophy, math, and/or religion.

EDIT:  Sorry if you read this pre-edit.  My spelling goes to pot when I am pushed to moralistic indignation. Also, I think the same kind of feelings are had by many individuals in applied sciences, like engineering and computer science.  Sorry for exclusions.

If you’re not familiar with Conservapedia yet, I highly recommend you make yourself acquainted with it, you know, to save yourself from the liberal propaganda peddled by Wikipedia. In all seriousness, though, the Wiki site created by the son of Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly really is fun to read, if only to be amused by a presentation of brilliant idiocy. What caught my eye today was the article on Noam Chomsky (a more balanced approach here. Now, I may be falling in with a crowd of linguists that find themselves at odds with the Chomskyan tradition, but I think this characterization of Chomsky’s work is pure bullshot.

Generative Grammar

Noam Chomsky advocates the view that the human brain has innate ability to generate gramatical [sic] sentences, thus all utterances which is deemed sensical [sic] to the speaker is necessarily grammatical, and the only role the liguist [sic] should play is to decipher its grammatical structure. This view has been criticized by many linguists as nihilistic in that it rejects the notion of ungrammatical sentences. Noam Chomsky also pointed to instances of infants utter grammatical sentence fragments they have not been taught before as evidence for Generative Grammar.

Okay. What? First of all, how is Generative Grammar nihilistic? Second, this misses the point of generative theory entirely.

Universal Grammar

Noam Chomsky also proposed the theory that a kind of universal grammar, a grammar that underlies all human languages, is hard-wired in the human brain. Thus all human languages are fundamentally the same, with only superficial differences. This theory of universal grammar has been criticized by linguist Geoffrey Sampson as being not falsifiable, arguing that the grammatical generalizations made are simply observations about existing languages and not predictions about what is possible in a language. To this day, the search for such universal grammar has been fruitless.

For decades, Noam Chomsky and his followers have been trying to make sense of sentences such as:

Who will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to?

which are deemed to be ungrammatical by a lot of linguists; by using techniques such as linking theory, anti-c-command requirement, A-positions, Bijection Principle, weakest crossover configurations, bound variable anaphora, asymmetric linking, licensing conditions, index of apronoun [sic], null operator analysis, variable binding, configurational [sic] conditions, inappropriate and appropriate antecedents, etc.

I am not even sure how to parse this, especially that, “the search for such universal grammar has been fruitless.” So I am not even going to try. What I will say is how funny it is that apparently, according to our moral superiors at Conservapedia, the theories contained within Chomsky’s generative approach have disproved his theory of Universal Grammar. I guess there are wackos (on both sides) that will take non-political details of people they don’t like and find a way to politicize them.

There are valid criticisms of Chomsky. I am not completely convinced of Universal Grammar or the Competence-Performance model, for example. There is experimental evidence that could refute the latter (which is based on an “ideal” speaker-hearer community, i.e. two people) in that uniformity impedes language acquisition. Additionally, when linguists hear an utterance, they are only measuring performance. Competence is, for all intents and purposes, off limits to measurement.