Let’s have a little fun and check out the linguistics behind our favorite interweb felines! While cats might not really be able to learn a foreign language, LOLcats have won our hearts with their endearing language.
Check out this fascinating video by Lauren Gawne: “I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak.”
Once you’ve watched the video, try out this fun LOLspeak translator and leave us a comment in LOLspeak!
Happy Friday Everyone!
Here is a fascinating lecture from linguist Steve Pinker on TED Talks about Language and Thought. Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds — and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.
In his lecture, Pinker says, “Languages is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another. And then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language, I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick.”
What are YOUR thoughts on the subject?
I’d like to share a couple funny and cute linguistics stories in this blog. I will be talking about how bilinguals recognize and speak words in each of their languages. What? That doesn’t sound cute? Just hang in there. I promise that this will be a cute but informative linguistic blog.
I am the mother of four children who are all bilingual in English and Spanish. Some time ago I was sitting with my now nine-year old son (I think he was 7 or maybe 8 at the time) as he read to me “The Digging-est Dog” by Al Perkins. He was doing an excellent job, but when he got to the page that reads, “I dug up fences, I dug up gates” without realizing his mistake he very confidently read, “I dug up fences, I dug up cats.”
So why would my son read “cats” instead of “gates”? Obviously “cats” and “gates” don’t rhyme or even really look similar, at least not in English. However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, my children are bilingual in English and Spanish. Well, the Spanish word for “cats” is “gatos.” Ahhh, you say! “Gatos” and “gates” look very much alike! It is easy to see how he could mistake “gates” for this other word “gatos.” What makes this case even more interesting is that while his brain apparently recognized the Spanish word “gatos” he produced the English translation for this word: “cats.” Although my son was reading in English and produced an English word, “cats,” it is evident that his Spanish lexicon (or mental dictionary or vocabulary list) was still very much active.
On another occasion, my older son asked me if he could fill and use a salt shaker I had brought back from Cuernavaca, Mexico. To which I replied, “No! You can’t use that! It’s a memory!” Does it seem strange that I referred to a salt shaker as a “memory”? Well, it may help to know that the word for souvenir in Spanish is “recuerdo” which literally translates to…you got it…“memory.”
Yet another time, I recall shopping for a digital video camera with my husband. We had picked out the camera, a bunch of editing software and additional accessories. My husband approached the salesman who was assisting us and asked, “So, how much for todo?” The salesman just smiled and continued to talk about the different features of the products we had chosen. My husband asked again, “How much for todo?” I was standing right beside my husband and could not figure out why the salesman was not answering him. Until of course it dawned on me that while I understood my husband’s question, the salesman who obviously did not speak Spanish, did not, because my husband was mixing the two languages: English and Spanish.
The focus of research in bilingualism for a long time was whether or not bilinguals have a single lexicon (mental dictionary) that comprises all of the words they know in both of their languages, or separate lexicons. And additionally, whether access to these is selective or not. Multiple theories to address these questions have been proposed.
One of these, the hierarchical model, proposes that the lexicons are combined at the conceptual level but separate at the word representational level. Basically bilinguals have separate “dictionaries” but that the entry for a particular word in each language links back to the same “meaning” or “concept.”
Another theory is the Bilingual Interactive Activation Model (BIA). This theory argues that letter strands activate possible lexical candidates (words) in both languages, which then compete for activation.
As with many questions in the field of Linguistics and specifically bilingualism, whether bilinguals have one or two “mental dictionaries” and how they access these is still not fully understood. However, for me as a Linguist it is exciting to be able to point to and analyze these everyday aspects of real life and apply it to my passion for languages.
Have you experienced a situation where you interchanged your “mental dictionaries”?
Hello again! My last syntax blog left off in the middle of a discussion of how some words draw other words to them in order to form a more complete thought. Recall the verb ate. Ate has to draw to it “the someone” who did the eating and “the something” that was eaten, in order to be a complete thought. You may wonder why ate is the element that draws the others to it. Well, ate, as we discussed before, describes a relationship between something and someone, that is, something was eaten by someone. Apple, on the other hand, does not describe a relationship or anything for that matter. Apple is a just a noun. We could say, “The apple is red” or “I ate the apple.” The same logic applies to any other noun.
We also briefly discussed the definite article the and how it also draws other elements to it in order to be complete. The begs the question, “The what?” Similar to how ate begs the question, “Who/What ate what?” I hope this better clarifies why certain types of words do the drawing, or assigning of thematic roles, while others do not. Remember, thematic roles are simple: the jobs that need to be filled by some word in order for the predicate, or word/phrase doing the assigning, to be a more complete thought.
In these syntax blogs, we have determined that some groups of words belong together, and we call these groups constituents. We have explored that within constituents there are even smaller groups referred to as phrases. I mentioned the names of some phrases–determiner phrases, verb phrases, etc.–and I also briefly mentioned that phrases are given different titles depending on the “head” of the group. So, we now return to this question: How do we determine the head of a phrase? The head of a phrase is the element that assigns thematic roles, or selects other words to complete it, and consequently causes movement of these words to merge with it. This is why in the phrase “ate the apple,” ate is the head. Ate selected the argument “the apple.” Or, said in a different way, ate assigned a thematic role to “the apple.” Additionally, the is the head of the phrase “the apple” because it selected its argument, apple.
Can you figure out which is the head of the following phrases: Cindy’s mother; blue house; small annoying child?
December 7th is Noam Chomsky’s birthday, so I’d like to dedicate this post to his contributions to Linguistics.
Noam Chomsky is the father of modern Linguistics. Back in 1957, Chomsky with his revolutionary book Syntactic Structures laid the foundation of his non-empiricist theory of language. Two years later, with his review of B. F. Skinner’ Verbal Behavior, he showed that Behaviorism, the dominant approach to language at the time, was no longer to be the way of studying language.
Chomsky’s major contribution to studying language was that he made it scientific. He demonstrated that despite the observable variety of the world’s languages, there is in reality only one language. All other languages; dead, still spoken or even future ones, are variations of a single theme. After Chomsky, linguistics is defined as “The Scientific Study of Language”, “language” in the singular. Linguistics, much like the other sciences, has the following three characteristics: first, it provides a general theory that explains why languages are the way they are: there is a universal basis, or faculty, in the mind, innate in every human and dedicated to language, that incorporates the basic principles, and what all of us do while learning our mother tongue at a tender age is setting values to these principles based on the data we get by exposure to an unorganized and random set of utterances via interaction with other people.
Second, the theory then generates testable hypotheses, rules and falsifiable predictions about what occurs in a language and hence in all human languages. The data used to test these hypotheses are native speakers’ intuitions on the grammaticality and ungrammaticality of the sentences of their language: what we study is what people tacitly know about their language.We do not study if sentences abide by the rules of grammar but if sentences can be explained with the hypotheses we make. To give an example, we do not study why “He love mangoes” is incorrect; rather, we investigate why “John eats occasionally mangoes” is not a well-formed sentence in English while it is perfectly grammatical in Greek. What prevents the adverb “occasionally” from being placed between the verb “eats” and the noun “mangoes” in English but not in Greek? By examining the native speakers’ tacit knowledge we get a better understanding of how the mind works: “language is a window into the mind”.
Third, these hypotheses change, get refined or are even abandoned when they cannot accommodate the data, and that’s the way we move on in our search for the truth in language learning.
In Linguistics, as in the other sciences, we aim at explaining some data and not everything, making small steps at a time. Many steps have been made since 1957 but we still have a long way to go. We have a sold path to follow thanks to Chomsky.
If you follow my blog you will know that I briefly touched on syntax once before. The Linguistic Elephant in the Room: Syntax (contrary to what it sounds like, it is not an increase in the price of beer or gambling) is a subfield of linguistics which focuses mainly on the grammar of language. This blog is just a brief introduction to some syntactic concepts. I will follow up with additional blogs to build and expand on the concepts presented here and /or introduce additional ones.
An important concept to understand in the beginning of a look at syntax is the idea of “the sentence.” You may think that a complete uttered or written thought is a sentence. In part you are correct. However, in the field of syntax the complete thought is given the term proposition, the written or spoken sentence is referred to as “the utterance.” The actual sentence is a bit more abstract. The “sentence” is the linguistic form of the utterance. For example, I can say on Tuesday, “It’s a nice day today.” And, you may use the same utterance on Wednesday. Therefore, these two utterances have different propositional meanings; one being that Tuesday is a nice day, and the other, that Wednesday is a nice day. However, both propositions used the same sentence or linguistic form. However, what if we both utter the same propositional meaning, i.e., “Today is a nice day” (today being Tuesday), but you utter this in English and I utter the same proposition but in Spanish? Clearly, the form of these utterances will be different. Therefore, we are using different sentences to express the same propositional meaning.
So the form we give to propositions is important, but what about the form? What makes one form acceptable and another not in a given language? You may think of word order. And, again this is partly correct. See the examples below:
(1) I picked up the mess Erik made with the cookies and juice you put out.
(2) I picked the mess Erik made with the cookies and juice you put out up.
Example (2) sounds awkward. This may lead you to say, that the words ‘pick’ and ‘up’ seem to belong together. However, now look at the following example:
(3) I picked the mess up.
And what about the following:
(4) I picked up the mess.
(5) I picked it up.
(6) *I picked up it.
So, it’s more than just whether ‘pick’ and ‘up’ come together in the sentence. Can you think of any other examples similar to the ones above?
If you were to conduct a survey on the street asking passers-by whether they think animals use language or not, you’ll likely get a mixture of “yeas” and “nays” (and probably more than a few “I don’t knows”). Many pet owners and animal lovers would absolutely enjoy having a conversation with the animals of the world (unless, perhaps, Finding Nemo was right about sea gulls). Some might believe that the reason we can’t speak to and understand animals is because they simply speak a different language than we do. But do they really possess the capabilities of language? Or is animal communication simply that – communication (not language)?
Many linguists believe that animals do not possess language. The crucial distinction is that linguists differentiate between communication and language. Communication (similar to “language”) can be difficult to define because it often uses other terms that, in turn, need definitions. But generally speaking, most people understand that communication is a transmission of information, and this information is “encoded” somehow in what we loosely call symbols. Language certainly is communication, then, but is all communication language? Most would say no: communication is much broader, and some would argue animal communication is a part of communication that doesn’t include language.
Robbins Burling (1993) argues in “Primate Calls, Human Language, and Nonverbal Communication” that nonverbal communication (most of which he refers to as “gesture-calls”) lacks an important means of distinguishing or contrasting because it “grades” along a continuum. He uses an example of a laugh grading into giggles, which grade into snorts, which grade into cries of objection, then cries of anguish, which then grade into sobs. The boundaries of these are fuzzy. Consider then language, which Burling states is very contrastive: we have thousands upon thousands of distinct words, our language distinguishes sounds from one another and tells us which are “allowed” and which aren’t, and of course we have a practically infinite number of distinct sentences that are possible. This is only the beginning of Burling’s argument, and we should mention that he also examines the similarities of language and non-verbal communication.
Now let’s look at another person’s ideas. Charles Hockett’s “The Problem of Universals in Language” (1966) proposes a detailed list of what he calls “design-features” of a language; these are essentially characteristics that are found in every human language and are absent in at least one known animal communication system. This doesn’t necessarily define human language, nor does his list only show differences between communication and language. However, some of his design-features have become very influential. Here are some brief explanations of a few:
Arbitrariness: the form and the meaning of a signal is arbitrary; there is no logical connection between the two. For example, there is nothing about the words “chien,” “cane,” “inu,” or “dog” that logically connects these forms with what they represent: a domesticated species of Canis that wags its tail when it’s happy and pants when it’s hot.
Prevarication: this simply means we can lie – our messages can be false, deceptive, or even meaningless.
Reflexiveness: you can use language to talk about language.
Productivity: speakers of language can invent – and understand – entirely novel messages that no one has ever uttered before.
Of course, there are many, many more arguments for and against the idea of animals possessing the capability of language. Both sides of the aisle make compelling arguments, but the final say is up to you! Can you think of any other differences and/or similarities between animal communication and language? Or are they one and the same? Is there a gray area”? Let us know what you think!
I recently watched an independent “zombie flick” called Pontypool. I’m using quotations because it’s not exactly your normal zombie movie – it was more about a disease than what the disease did to people. So what does this have to do with linguistics? Well, in Pontypool, the virus that caused mobs of cannibalistic non-persons to overrun the small eponymous Ontario town wasn’t transmitted by blood, or saliva, or anything biological. It was in fact transmitted by “infected” words: if a person heard an infected word, they would begin to repeat it over and over uncontrollably until they essentially couldn’t function, presumably because the virus took over. It would begin to sneak into their sentences. One victim “caught” the virus through the word “sample” – he first was talking about something “simple,” but the infection caught on and, like an uncontrollable tic, he hesitatingly asked the radio DJ he was speaking to if he had any samples to play. Sample. Sample. Samplesamplesample.
The most interesting part of this lexical disease to me was when a doctor in the movie came to the conclusion that only when you understand the infected word does it infect you as well. As I was watching the movie, I started thinking about what this means linguistically. Judging by the doctor’s explanation, you could be infected only if you had a lexical entry stored for a given infected word and, moreover, you successfully accessed it. At this point it seemed that this lexical entry was “unleashed” and overpowered all of the other ones stored, causing the newly zombified person to repeat the word over and over. When the female lead character found herself becoming infected by the word “kill,” the main character tried to “replace” the word, to distract her from “kill,” by eventually saying “Kill is kiss.” He repeated this over and over so that she would, in effect, replace her lexical entry for “kill” with that of “kiss” – a sort of induced or forced aphasia, in my approximation. This scene ended with the female character saying, “Kill me,” and the male character obliged by giving her a passionate kiss, curing her.
Another way the characters avoided infection was by speaking in a language other than English. The characters determined that only English words were infected, so the doctor spoke his thoughts aloud in Armenian while the male and female lead characters spoke French as best they could. This part made sense to me, since a French word wouldn’t access an English lexical entry. Even if the native English speaker accessed the corresponding translation in English after understanding it in French, it wasn’t because the word was spoken and understood in English; rather they traveled to the English entry via the French one. This interpretation assumes that bilinguals have two separate lexicons, however – one for each language. Psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists differ in their opinions about lexicon, however. What would the implications be if both languages were stored in one common lexicon in the mind? I think, for this movie, it would mean speaking in another language wouldn’t stop the infection. And what about the “replaced” words, like the “kill is kiss” method? Well, you could argue that this is another “indirect” access to kill’s lexical entry, via “kiss,” perhaps.
In the end, I decided to stop thinking about it because I was going to miss the rest of the movie, but it was an entertaining thought experiment. What do you think – are the “cures” plausible? Why or why not? Do you have a better cure for the word-zombies?
Lately, a few of us around the office have been bugging the product development team (jokingly) to come out with a Sicilian course. This begs the question, isn’t Sicilian just a dialect of Italian? It turns out there is actually a good deal of debate over this subject.
Some linguists believe that Sicilian may have actually been the first Romance Language, arising from a vulgar form of Latin spoken by Roman military men and everyday people. It is placed in the Italiano meridionale-estremo group of languages along with the Greek influenced Calabrian dialects of southern Italy, and actually has at least eleven regional dialects of its own.
The Sicilian language has been shaped by many years of foreign influence, occupation, and conquest. Unlike Italian, which is almost entirely Latin based, Sicilian has elements of Greek, Arabic, French, Catalan, and Spanish. This can be seen in many Sicilian words, like “azzizzari” (to embellish, adorn) from the Arabic “aziz” (beautiful), or “foddi” (angry), which can be traced to the Norman French “fol.”
Grammatically, Sicilian is also very different from Italian. For example, all the pronouns for I, he, she, you, and them are different in Sicilian. Also, take into account that Sicilian does not distinguish between plural endings for verbs, using the same conjugations for masculine and feminine nouns. In Italian, the plural form differs according to gender, and there is much more concern about agreement between nouns and adjoining adjectives.
A great deal of the actual Italian influence on Sicilian has been since 1860, when, during the Italian Unification, Sicily became a part of Italy. More and more, there is risk today that the Sicilian language will eventually die out due to the influx of the Italian language into Sicily, becoming the preferred tongue among the natives. Even Sicilian emigrants, like my own family, speak a brand of the language which is different from what actual native Sicilians speak, simply because the language has changed so much even in the last 50 years.
So what’s the verdict? Have you met anyone who speaks Sicilian? Do you think that it is a language or a dialect?
Recently I have tasked myself with learning more about linguistics. This is most likely due to my desire to expand my global literacy, and has nothing to do with the great, fun, bright, energetic group of linguists that we employ. ☺
Following today’s work session I learned about cases. “Cases?” you’re wondering. “We know about cases: court cases, briefcases, containers…” No, I’m talking linguistics; I’m talking about the case system. If some of you are wondering “huh?” it’s because in English we don’t have a case system. Well no worries, because you’re about to learn. (Editor’s note: English actually does have a case system for pronouns)
Without a doubt there are a lot of languages out there. The general populous is aware that many languages have different letters and that most have different words. But there are other differences. Some languages have declining nouns. These are nouns that change just like how some of our verbs change. Nouns can change based on what they are doing, or what is being done to them. Yes! Verbs conjugate, and nouns decline. Some sentences in some languages might involve the same noun with different declensions. Sometimes you can even know the proper declension based on the case. There are several cases: nominative, genitive, accusative, verbative, dative, etc., etc., etc. Some languages have even more! vThese languages include Latin and some of the Romance languages and maybe even Romanian.
These languages (along with a handful of others) rely on the declining nouns to make sense in the same fashion that the English language relies on word order. So while “the boy ate the dog” is clear to us based on the word order, some languages may extract the exact same meaning from “Boy dog ate” due to the amazing declining nouns. I know…crazy stuff but very interesting!
What other declining noun examples can you think of?
