Thoughts about: An Introduction to Language (Fromkin et al)

Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Nina Hyams - An Introduction to Language I thought i better read a linguistics textbook before i start studying it formally. Who wud want to look like a noob? ;) I have not read any other textbook on this subject, but i think it was a fairly typical okish textbook. Many of the faults with it are mentioned below in this long 'review'.

Chapter 1

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In the Renaissance a new middle class emerged who wanted their children to speak the dialect of the “upper” classes. This desire led to the publication of many prescriptive grammars. In 1762 Bishop Robert Lowth wrote A Short Intro- duction to English Grammar with Critical Notes. Lowth prescribed a number of new rules for English, many of them influenced by his personal taste. Before the publication of his grammar, practically everyone—upper-class, middle-class, and lower-class—said I don’t have none and You was wrong about that. Lowth, however, decided that “two negatives make a positive” and therefore one should say I don’t have any; and that even when you is singular it should be followed by the plural were. Many of these prescriptive rules were based on Latin grammar and made little sense for English. Because Lowth was influential and because the rising new class wanted to speak “properly,” many of these new rules were legislated into English grammar, at least for the prestige dialect—that variety of the language spoken by people in positions of power. The view that dialects that regularly use double negatives are inferior can- not be justified if one looks at the standard dialects of other languages in the world. Romance languages, for example, use double negatives, as the following examples from French and Italian show:

French: Je ne veux parler avec personne. I not want speak with no-one.

Italian: Non voglio parlare con nessuno. not I-want speak with no-one.

English translation: “I don’t want to speak with anyone.”

Lowth seems to have done a good thing with his reasoning, which was obviously inspired from math: multiplying two negatives does give a positive (-1*-1=+1). The reason is logic, altho predicate logic which wasnt invented at his time (i.e., in the 1700s). Formalizing the negro english sentence "I don’t have none" yields something like this: ¬∃x¬Hix --- it is not the case that there is something such that i dont have it. which is equivalent with: ∀xHix --- For any thing, i have that thing [i.e. i have everything]. Ofc, it may seem that with this remark im begging the question, but the formalization wud be closer to the natural language which is always a good thing. Im not begging the question with that remark. Furthermore, his rule made the language simpler as one no longer had to needlessly inflect the frase "anyone" into its negative form "no one". Simpler languages are better if they have the same expressive power. Doing away with a needless inflection is good per definition makes the language simpler without losing expressive power. He was wrong about the thing with "you was". It wud have been nice if it had stayed that way. Then english cud have begun moving towards the simplicity of verb conjugation in scandinavian. ---

When we say in later chapters that a sentence is grammatical we mean that it conforms to the rules of the mental grammar (as described by the linguist); when we say that it is ungrammatical, we mean it deviates from the rules in some way. If, however, we posit a rule for English that does not agree with your intuitions as a speaker, then the grammar we are describing differs in some way from the mental grammar that represents your linguistic competence; that is, your lan- guage is not the one described. No language or variety of a language (called a dialect) is superior to any other in a linguistic sense. Every grammar is equally complex, logical, and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought. If something can be expressed in one language or one dialect, it can be expressed in any other language or dialect. It might involve different means and different words, but it can be expressed. We will have more to say about dialects in chapter 10. This is true as well for languages of technologically underdeveloped cultures. The grammars of these languages are not primitive or ill formed in any way. They have all the richness and complexity of the gram- mars of languages spoken in technologically advanced cultures.

Stupid relativism. Of course some dialects and languages are superior to others! The awful german grammar system is much inferior to the simpler scandinavian systems or the english system. More difficult it is to say which of those systems are superior to which. English has gotten rid of grammatical gender (good!) but returns pointless verb conjugations (bad!) in scandinavian there are grammatical genders (bad, but only 2 not 3 as in german) but much less pointless verb conjugation (good!). Why do the authors write this relativism nonsense? They dislike language puritanists:

Today our bookstores are populated with books by language purists attempt- ing to “save the English language.” They criticize those who use  enormity to mean “enormous” instead of “monstrously evil.” But languages change in the course of time and words change meaning. Language change is a natural pro- cess, as we discuss in chapter 11. Over time enormity was used more and more in the media to mean “enormous,” and we predict that now that President Barack Obama has used it that way (in his victory speech of November 4, 2008), that usage will gain acceptance. Still, the “saviors” of the English language will never disappear. They will continue to blame television, the schools, and even the National Council of Teachers of English for failing to preserve the standard language, and are likely to continue to dis (oops, we mean disparage) anyone who suggests that African American English (AAE)4 and other dialects are via- ble, complete languages. In truth, human languages are without exception fully expressive, complete, and logical, as much as they were two hundred or two thousand years ago. Hopefully (another frowned-upon usage), this book will convince you that all languages and dialects are rule-governed, whether spoken by rich or poor, pow- erful or weak, learned or illiterate. Grammars and usages of particular groups in society may be dominant for social and political reasons, but from a linguistic (scientific) perspective they are neither superior nor inferior to the grammars and usages of less prestigious members of society.

They are right to be annoyed at the purists, they are wrong to completely abandon prescriptive grammar because of it. (Baby, bathtub) -

To hold that animals communicate by systems qualitatively different from human language systems is not to claim human superiority. Humans are not inferior to the one-celled amoeba because they cannot reproduce by splitting in two; they are just different sexually. They are not inferior to hunting dogs, whose sense of smell is far better than that of human animals. As we will discuss in the next chapter, the human language ability is rooted in the human brain, just as the communication systems of other species are determined by their bio- logical structure. All the studies of animal communication systems, including those of primates, provide evidence for Descartes’ distinction between other ani- mal communication systems and the linguistic creative ability possessed by the human animal.

More relativism. So, humans are not inferior to dogs with regards to smelling.. they are just.. olfactory challenged? With thing with reproduction is harder. Asexual and (bi)sexual reproduction both have some advantages and disadvantages. Cellular division wud obviously not work for humans (we are too complex), but asexual reproduction might work somewhat. We get to try it out soon when we start cloning people. Im looking forward to when we start digging up the graves of past geniuses to make a clone of them i.e., harvest some DNA and insert it into an egg, and put that egg into a woman. -

In our understanding of the world we are certainly not “at the mercy of what- ever language we speak,” as Sapir suggested. However, we may ask whether the language we speak influences our cognition in some way. In the domain of color categorization, for example, it has been shown that if a language lacks a word for red, say, then it’s harder for speakers to reidentify red objects. In other words, having a label seems to make it easier to store or access information in memory. Similarly, experiments show that Russian speakers are better at discriminating light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy) objects than English speakers, whose language does not make a lexical distinction between these categories. These results show that words can influence simple perceptual tasks in the domain of color discrimination. Upon reflection, this may not be a surprising finding. Colors exist on a continuum, and the way we segment into “different” colors happens at arbitrary points along this spectrum. Because there is no physical motivation for these divisions, this may be the kind of situation where language could show an effect.

But this is simply not true. The segmentations are not at all arbitrary. It is strange that the authors claim this as they just reviewed information form a language that segments colors into two categories: light and dark colors. These are not arbitrary categories. I learned about this from Lakoff's Women, Fire, Dangerous Things (which is hosted somewhere on my site), but see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate. -

Chapter 2

Additional evidence regarding hemispheric specialization is drawn from Japa- nese readers. The Japanese language has two main writing systems. One system, kana, is based on the sound system of the language; each symbol corresponds to a syllable. The other system, kanji, is ideographic; each symbol corresponds to a word. (More about this in chapter 12 on writing systems.) Kanji is not based on the sounds of the language. Japanese people with left-hemisphere damage are impaired in their ability to read kana, whereas people with right-hemisphere damage are impaired in their ability to read kanji. Also, experiments with unim- paired Japanese readers show that the right hemisphere is better and faster than the left hemisphere at reading kanji, and vice versa.

This is pretty cool! Even better, it fits with the data from the last book i read:

Visual memory is not normally tested in intelligence tests. There have been four studies of the visual memory of the Japanese, the results of which are summarized in Table 10.7. Row 1 gives a Japanese IQ of 107 for 5-10-year-olds on the MFFT calculated from error scores com- pared with an American sample numbering 2,676. The MFFT consists of the presentation of drawings of a series of objects, e.g., a boat, hen, etc. that have to be matched to an identical drawing among several that are closely similar. The task entails the memorization of the de- tails of the drawings in order to find the perfect match. Performance on the task correlates 0.38 with the performance scale of the WISC (Plomin and Buss, 1973), so that it is a weak test of visualization ability and general intelligence as well as a test of visual memory. Row 2 gives a visual memory IQ of 105 for ethnic  Japanese Americans compared with American Europeans on two tests of visual memory consisting of the presentation of 20 objects for 25 seconds and then removed, and the task was to remember and rearrange their positions. Row 3 shows a visual memory IQ of 110 obtained by comparing a sample of Japanese high school and university students with a sample of 52 European students at University College, Dublin. Row 4 shows a visual memory IQ of 113 for the visual reproduction subtests of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised obtained from the Japanese standardization of the test compared with the American standardization sample. The test involves the drawing from memory of geomet- ric designs presented for 10 seconds. The authors suggest that the explanation for the Japanese superiority may be that Japanese children learn kanji, the Japanese idiographic script, and this develops visual memory capacity. However, this hypothesis was apparently disproved by the Flaherty and Connolly study (1996) whose results are shown in row 2. Some of the ethnic Japanese American participants had a knowledge of kanji, while others did not, and there was no difference in visual memory between those who knew and those who did not know kanji, disproving the theory that the advantage of East Asians on visualization tasks arises from their practice on visualizing idiographic scripts. (Richard Lynn, Race differences in intelligence, p. 94)

It fits. Why else wud those people choose a very visual language instead of a more sound (i.e. verbal) focused one? Tests also show that east asians are worse at verbal tasks. This makes perfectly sense with their writing system. -

Chapter 3

In the foregoing dialogue, Humpty Dumpty is well aware that the prefix un- means “not,” as further shown in the following pairs of words: A ----------------- B desirable ------ undesirable likely ---------- unlikely inspired ------- uninspired happy --------- unhappy developed----- undeveloped sophisticated - unsophisticated

Thousands of English adjectives begin with un-. If we assume that the most basic unit of meaning is the word, what do we say about parts of words like un-, which has a fixed meaning? In all the words in the B column, un- means the same thing—“not.” Undesirable means “not desirable,” unlikely means “not likely,” and so on. All the words in column B consist of at least two meaningful units: un + desirable, un + likely, un + inspired, and so on.

The authors are again wrong. The un prefix does not mean "not" in these examples! An undesirable person is more than just someone that isnt desirable, it is someone who is, well, positively undesirable; that one wants to avoid. Similarly for likely+unlikely. When one says that something is unlikely, one is saying more than just saying that it is not likely. One is saying that it has a low probability of happening. The difference here is that the event cud be neither likely or unlikely, i.e. having a probability around .5 (or whatever, depends on context). An unhappy person is someone who is sad or depressed, not just someone who isnt happy. A neutral person is neither happy or unhappy. An example of a word where the un prefix has the simple meaning of negation, is something like unmarried which really only does mean "not married". The un prefix in many if not all of their examples has the function of reversing the quality in question, not negating it. I have pointed this out before, but it was in a forum post on FRDB where i am now banned and therefore cannot search using the built-in search tool.

Chapter 4

Whether a verb takes a complement or not depends on the properties of the verb. For example, the verb find is a transitive verb. A transitive verb requires an NP complement (direct object), as in The boy found the ball, but not *The boy found, or *The boy found in the house. Some verbs like eat are optionally tran- sitive. John ate and John ate a sandwich are both grammatical. Verbs select different kinds of complements. For example, verbs like put and give take both an NP and a PP complement, but cannot occur with either alone:

Sam put the milk in the refrigerator. *Sam put the milk. Robert gave the film to his client. *Robert gave to his client.

Sleep is an intransitive verb; it cannot take an NP complement. Michael slept. *Michael slept a fish.

What about: "Sam puts out." (see meaning #6) That lacks a NP and is grammatical. And how about: "Robert gave a talk." (see meaning #2) That lacks a PP and is grammatical. It seems that the authors shud have chosen some better example verbs. -

Chapter 5

For most sentences it does not make sense to say that they are always true or always false. Rather, they are true or false in a given situation, as we pre- viously saw with  Jack swims. But a restricted number of sentences are indeed always true regardless of the circumstances. They are called  tautologies. (The term analytic is also used for such sentences.) Examples of tautologies are sen- tences like Circles are round or A person who is single is not married. Their truth is guaranteed solely by the meaning of their parts and the way they are put together. Similarly, some sentences are always false. These are called contra- dictions. Examples of contradictions are sentences like Circles are square or A bachelor is married.

Not entirely correct. Analytic sentences are noncontingent sentences, not just noncontingetly true sentences. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/ Later on they write:

The following sentences are either tautologies (analytic), contradictions, or situationally true or false.

Indicating that they think analytic refers only to noncontingetly true propositions/sentences. Also, they shud perhaps have studied some more filosofy, so that they wudn't have to rely on the homemade term situationally true when there already exists a standard term for this, namely contingently true. -

Much of what we know is deduced from what people say alongside our obser- vations of the world. As we can deduce from the quotation, Sherlock Holmes took deduction to the ultimate degree. Often, deductions can be made based on language alone.

Sadly, the authors engage in the common practice of referring to what Sherlock Holmes did as "deduction". It wasn't. It was mostly abduction aka. inference to the best explanation. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/ -

Generally, entailment goes only in one direction. So while the sentence Jack swims beautifully entails Jack swims, the reverse is not true. Knowing merely that Jack swims is true does not necessitate the truth of Jack swims beautifully. Jack could be a poor swimmer. On the other hand, negating both sentences reverses the entailment. Jack doesn’t swim entails Jack doesn’t swim beautifully.

They are not negating it properly. They are using what i before called short-form negation. Compare: "Jack doesn’t swim" (∃!x)x=j∧¬Sj with "It is not the case that Jack swims" ¬(∃!x)x=j∧Sj These two do not mean the same, strictly speaking. And the distinction does sometimes matter. The one entails that Jack exists and the second does not. This matters when one is talking about sentences such as "The current king of France is bald".  I have explained this before. -

The notion of entailment can be used to reveal knowledge that we have about other meaning relations. For example, omitting tautologies and contradictions, two sentences are  synonymous (or paraphrases) if they are both true or both false with respect to the same situations. Sentences like Jack put off the meeting and Jack postponed the meeting are synonymous, because when one is true the other must be true; and when one is false the other must also be false. We can describe this pattern in a more concise way by using the notion of entailment: Two sentences are synonymous if they entail each other.

The authors conflate 'meaning the same' with 'having the same truth-value'. These are not the same. Some sentences always have the same truth-value (they belong to the same equivalence class) but do not mean the same. Examples are e.g.: "Canada is north of the US" and "The US is south of Canada" These two don't mean the same, but they belong to the same equivalence class. The relation among the entities is reversed in the other sentence i.e. "... is north of ..." and "... is south of ..." do not mean the same. They mean the opposite of each other. See Swartz and Bradley (1979:35ff) for more examples and a more thoro discussion. -

The semantic theory of sentence meaning that we just sketched is not the only possible one, and it is also incomplete, as shown by the paradoxical sen- tence This sentence is false. The sentence cannot be true, else it’s false; it cannot be false, else it’s true. Therefore it has no truth value, though it certainly has meaning. This notwithstanding, compositional truth-conditional semantics has proven to be an extremely powerful and useful tool for investigating the seman- tic properties of natural languages.

Obviously, i'm not going to let this one fly! :) Things are not nearly as simple as they write. I will just point to my friend's, Benjamin Burgis, recent dissertation (ph.d.) about the liar paradox and other related problems. One point tho. Note the authors strange inference from to "Therefore, it has no truth value". -

In the previous sections we saw that semantic rules compute sentence meaning compositionally based on the meanings of words and the syntactic structure that contains them. There are, however, interesting cases in which compositionality breaks down, either because there is a problem with words or with the semantic rules. If one or more words in a sentence do not have a meaning, then obviously we will not be able to compute a meaning for the entire sentence. Moreover, even if the individual words have meaning but cannot be combined together as required by the syntactic structure and related semantic rules, we will also not get to a meaning. We refer to these situations as semantic anomaly. Alternatively, it might require a lot of creativity and imagination to derive a meaning. This is what happens in metaphors. Finally, some expressions—called idioms—have a fixed meaning, that is, a meaning that is not compositional. Applying composi- tional rules to idioms gives rise to funny or inappropriate meanings.

A bit of clarification is needed here. They are right if they mean the word is used in the sentence. They are wrong if they mean the word is mentioned in the sentence. The unclear frasing "in a sentence" won't do here. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quotation/#2.2 -

The semantic properties of words determine what other words they can be com- bined with. A sentence widely used by linguists that we encountered in chapter 4 illustrates this fact:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The sentence obeys all the syntactic rules of English. The subject is  colorless green ideas and the predicate is sleep furiously. It has the same syntactic struc- ture as the sentence

Dark green leaves rustle furiously.

but there is obviously something semantically wrong with the sentence. The meaning of  colorless  includes the semantic feature “without color,” but it is combined with the adjective green, which has the feature “green in color.” How can something be both “without color” and “green in color”? Other semantic violations occur in the sentence. Such sentences are semantically anomalous.

The authors seem to be saying that all sentences that involves contradictions are semantically anomalous. But that is not true, if by that they mean that such sentences are meaningless. Self-contradictory sentences are meaningless alright. Otherwise, their negations (which are necessarily true) wud be meaningless too. A grammatically correct placed negation can never make a sentence meaningful or meaningless. I have discussed this before. See this essay, and this post (by the good doctor Burgis) and the comments section below. The authors however do mention later that:

The well-known colorless green ideas sleep furiously is semantically anomalous because ideas (colorless or not) are not animate.

So, i'm not sure what they think. Perhaps they think that the chomsky is anomalous for both reasons, i.e. 1) that it is self-contradictory, and 2) it involves a category error with the verb sleep and the subject ideas. -

Another part of the meaning of the words baby and child is that they are “young.” (We will continue to indicate words by using italics and semantic fea- tures by double quotes.) The word father has the properties “male” and “adult” as do uncle and bachelor.

(I have restored the authors italicization in the above quote) First, it bothers me when authors want to put a given word in quotation marks but then include something that doesn't belong in there with it, typically a comma or a dot. Very annoying! Second, they are wrong about these semantic features. The word father has the features "parent" and "male". It has no feature about adulthood altho that it is often the case. There is nothing semantically strange or anomalous about calling a person who is 15 years old a father if he has a child. Similar things hold about their other example uncle. -

Generally, the count/mass distinction corresponds to the difference between discrete objects and homogeneous substances. But it would be incorrect to say that this distinction is grounded in human perception, because different lan- guages may treat the same object differently. For example, in English the words hair, furniture, and spaghetti are mass nouns. We say Some hair is curly, Much furniture is poorly made, John loves spaghetti. In Italian, however, these words are count nouns, as illustrated in the following sentences:

Ivano ha mangiato molti spaghetti ieri sera. Ivano ate many spaghettis last evening. Piero ha comprato un mobile. Piero bought a furniture. Luisella ha pettinato i suoi capelli. Luisella combed her hairs. We would have to assume a radical form of linguistic determinism (remem- ber the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from chapter 1) to say that Italian and English speakers have different perceptions of hair, furniture, and spaghetti. It is more reasonable to assume that languages can differ to some extent in the semantic features they assign to words with the same referent, somewhat independently of the way they conceptualize that referent. Even within a particular language we can have different words—count and mass—to describe the same object or substance. For example, in English we have shoes (count) and footwear (mass), coins (count) and change (mass). But what about a nonperfect correlation? The data mentioned above does not disprove the existence of a such thing. It wud be interesting to do a cross-language study to see if there was a correlation. I wud be very surprised if there was no such correlation. I will bet money that something like this is the case: The more discrete an entity is, the higher the chance that the thing will be a countable noun. It is not surprising that their examples involves things that almost always but not always come in bundles. But i'd wager that no language has car as a noncountable noun. The entity is too discrete for that to make sense. Likely, i'd be surprised if any language had water as a countable noun. Generally, words for fluids are probably always (or nearly so) noncountable nouns. Even if the words for the entities that these fluids are made of are countable nouns e.g. a molecule. -

In all languages, the reference of certain words and expressions relies entirely on the situational context of the utterance, and can only be understood in light of these circumstances. This aspect of pragmatics is called deixis (pronounced “dike-sis”). Pronouns are deictic. Their reference (or lack of same) is ultimately context dependent. Expressions such as

this person that man these women those children are also deictic, because they require situational information for the listener to make a referential connection and understand what is meant. These examples illustrate person deixis. They also show that the demonstrative articles like this and that are deictic. We also have  time deixis and place deixis. The following examples are all deictic expressions of time: now then tomorrow this time that time seven days ago two weeks from now last week next April ... In filosofy, these are called indexicals. Or so i thought, apparently, there is some difference according to Wikipedia. Deixis seems to be a bit broader. -

Implicatures are different than entailments. An entailment cannot be can- celled; it is logically necessary. Implicatures are also different than presupposi- tions. They are the possible consequences of utterances in their context, whereas presuppositions are situations that must exist for utterances to be appropriate in context, in other words, to obey Grice’s Maxims. Further world knowledge may cancel an implicature, but the utterances that led to it remain sensible and well- formed, whereas further world knowledge that negates a presupposition—oh, the team didn’t lose after all—renders the entire utterance inappropriate and in violation of Grice’s Maxims.

To be fair, they only talked about deductive inferences or entailment before. But some entailment maybe be 'cancelled' by further information or premises as they are called in logic. Logics where new information can make an inference worse or better are called non-monotonic. -

Chapter 6

Throughout several centuries English scholars have advocated spelling reform. George Bernard Shaw complained that spelling was so inconsistent that fish could be spelled ghoti—gh as in tough, o as in women, and ti as in nation. Nonetheless, spelling reformers failed to change our spelling habits, and it took phoneticians to invent an alphabet that absolutely guaranteed a one sound–one symbol correspondence. There could be no other way to study the sounds of all human languages scientifically.

It's not their fault tho. Blame the politicians. As i have repeatedly shown, there are various good ways to reform english spelling. In fact, i've begun working on my own ultra minimalistic reform proposal. More on that later. :) -

The sounds of all languages fall into two classes: consonants and vowels. Con- sonants are produced with some restriction or closure in the vocal tract that impedes the flow of air from the lungs. In phonetics, the terms consonant and vowel refer to types of sounds, not to the letters that represent them. In speaking of the alphabet, we may call “a” a vowel and “c” a consonant, but that means only that we use the letter “a” to represent vowel sounds and the letter “c” to represent consonant sounds.

Indeed. I recall that when i invented Lyddansk (my danish reform proposal) i had to make this distinction. I called them vowel-letters and consonant-letters (translated). -

5.  The following are all English words written in a broad phonetic transcrip- tion (thus omitting details such as nasalization and aspiration). Write the words using normal English orthography. a. [hit] b. [strok] c. [fez] d. [ton] e. [boni] f. [skrim] g. [frut] h. [pritʃər] i. [krak] j. [baks] k. [θæŋks] l. [wɛnzde] m. [krɔld] n. [kantʃiɛntʃəs] o. [parləmɛntæriən] p. [kwəbɛk] q. [pitsə] r. [bərak obamə] s. [dʒɔn məken] t. [tu θaʊzənd ænd et]

I really, really dislike their strange choice of fonetical symbols. They don't correspond to major dictionaries online nor the OED. Especially confusing is using /e/ for both /e/ and /eɪ/ as in eight, which they write as /et/ instead of the normal /eɪt/ found in pretty much all dictionaries (example: 1, 2, and the OED gives the same pronunciation). To those that are wondering, here is what i think the correct answers are: a. [hit] hit b. [strok] stroke but their symbolism is confusing, they use /o/ to mean IPA /əʊ/ c. [fez] face? which shud be /feɪs/ d. [ton] it is tempting to guess ton until one thinks of their strange use of /o/ to mean /əʊ/, the correct word must be tone /təʊn/ e. [boni] bunny is tempting, but it seems to be boney /bəʊni/ f. [skrim] scrim g. [frut] froot, they fail to indicate that the vowel is long i.e. /fru:t/ h. [pritʃər] preacher i. [krak] crack j. [baks] backs is tempting, but it appears to be barks i.e. /bɑːks/ k. [θæŋks] thanks l. [wɛnzde] another strange one, i think it is wednesday i.e. /wʒnzdeɪ/ m. [krɔld] crawled n. [kantʃiɛntʃəs] conscientious? i.e. /kɒnʃɪˈɛnʃəs/ o. [parləmɛntæriən] parliamentarian p. [kwəbɛk] Quebec q. [pitsə] pizza r. [bərak obamə] Barack Obama s. [dʒɔn məken] John McCain t. [tu θaʊzənd ænd et] two thousand and eight, with eight which shud be /eɪt/. In general, their introduction to fonetics is bad when it disagrees with pretty much all dictionaries. Learn fonetics somewhere else. I learned it from Wikipedia and using lots of dictionaries. -

Chapter 7

Nothing interesting to note here.

Chapter 8

Some time after the age of one, the child begins to repeatedly use the same string of sounds to mean the same thing. At this stage children realize that sounds are related to meanings. They have produced their first true words. The age of the child when this occurs varies and has nothing to do with the child’s intelligence. (It is reported that Einstein did not start to speak until he was three or four years old.)

It saddens me to see that a textbook with a chapter about children and learning spread this myth! It is not that hard to google it and discover it to be an urban myth. See: http://www.learninginfo.org/einstein-learning-disability.htm -

[bərt]  “(Big) Bird”

Another annoying detail with their chosen fonetical symbols is that they fail to distinguish between schwa /ə/ which is an unstressed vowel, and the similar sounding but potentially stressed vowel /ɜ/. Again, they don't use the same standards as used by dictionaries, which is annoying! But see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwa and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-central_vowel -

1.  Hans hat ein Buch gekauft. “Hans has a book bought.” 2.  Hans kauft ein Buch. “Hans is buying a book.”

I don't get it. How can a linguistics textbook get the translation wrong? The correct translation of (2) is "Hans buys a book.". -

Another experimental technique, called the naming task, asks the subject to read aloud a printed word. (A variant of the naming task is also used in stud- ies of people with aphasia, who are asked to name the object shown in a pic- ture.) Subjects read irregularly spelled words like dough and steak just slightly more slowly than regularly spelled words like doe and stake, but still faster than invented strings like cluff. This suggests that people can do two different things in the naming task. They can look for the string in their mental lexicon, and if they find it (i.e., if it is a real word), they can pronounce the stored phonologi- cal representation for it. They can also “sound it out,” using their knowledge of how certain letters or letter sequences (e.g., “gh,” “oe”) are most commonly pronounced. The latter is obviously the only way to come up with a pronuncia- tion for a nonexisting word. The fact that irregularly spelled words are read more slowly than regularly spelled real words suggests that the mind “notices” the irregularity. This may be because the brain is trying to do two tasks—lexical look-up and sounding out the word—in parallel in order to perform naming as fast as possible. When the two approaches yield inconsistent results, a conflict arises that takes some time to resolve.

 This is very interesting! I didn't know that badly spelled words were read more slowly. That's good news, or bad news, depending. :P It is good in that i may now have another argument for spelling reform: it makes people more efficient readers. It is also testable between populations+languages. Everything else equal, are people that read a well-spelled language faster readers than people that read a horribly spelled language (like english and danish)? That's an interesting question actually. It sounds sufficiently simple and obvius that someone must have done the study. As for the bad news part, if they are right, it means i'm being inefficient becus i'm reading in a bad language. Worse, the entire world is being inefficient becus of its 'choice' of world language (i.e. english).

Chapter 9

Some systems draw on formal logic for semantic representations. You put up the switch would be represented in a function/argument form, which is its logi- cal form:

PUT UP (YOU, THE SWITCH)

where PUT UP is a “two-place predicate,” in the jargon of logicians, and the arguments are YOU and THE SWITCH. The lexicon indicates the appropriate relationships between the arguments of the predicate PUT UP.

I really, really dislike the term argument when used to mean the thing that one puts into functions or predicates. It is really a very, very bad choice of words for the context (logic). argument already has a rather precise meaning in that context. I prefer the term variable but there is another and better term that i prefer more, but i can't seem to recall it right now. -

 A keyword as general as bird may return far more information than could be read in ten lifetimes if a thorough search of the Web occurs. (A search on the day of this writing produced 200 million hits, compared to 122 million four years prior.) [...]

I re-did the search. 1,100 million hits. -

 Chapter 10

It is not always easy to decide whether the differences between two speech communities reflect two dialects or two languages. Sometimes this rule-of- thumb definition is used: When dialects become mutually unintelligible—when the speakers of one dialect group can no longer understand the speakers of another dialect group—these dialects become different languages. However, this rule of thumb does not always jibe with how languages are officially recognized, which is determined by political and social considerations. For example, Danes speaking Danish and Norwegians speaking Norwegian and Swedes speaking Swedish can converse with each other. Nevertheless, Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are considered separate languages because they are spoken in separate countries and because there are regular differences in their grammars. Similarly, Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible “languages” spo- ken in Pakistan and India, although the differences between them are not much greater than those between the English spoken in America and the English spo- ken in Australia.

Not citing any sources for such claims is bad. The mutual intelligibility is not that high between the scandinavian languages. It is much higher for written text between norwegian (bokmål) and danish. Etc. See the Wikipedia link. -

English is the most widely spoken language in the world (as a first or second language). It is the national language of several countries, including the United States, large parts of Canada, the British Isles, Australia, and New Zealand. For many years it was the official language in countries that were once colonies of Britain, including India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and the other “anglophone” countries of Africa. There are many other phonological differences in the vari- ous dialects of English used around the globe.

This is certainly false. Look at Wikipedia. Mandarin is the most spoken native language. English is probably the most spoken non-native language. ETA: But then later they write

The Sino-Tibetan family includes Mandarin, the most populous language in the world, spoken by more than one billion Chinese. This family also includes all of the Chinese languages, as well as Burmese and Tibetan.

So, i don't know what they think. -

Even though every language is a composite of dialects, many people talk and think about a language as if it were a well-defined fixed system with various dialects diverging from this norm. This is false, although it is a falsehood that is widespread. One writer of books on language accused the editors of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, published in 1961, of confusing “to the point of obliteration the older distinction between standard, substandard, collo- quial, vulgar, and slang,” attributing to them the view that “good and bad, right and wrong, correct and incorrect no longer exist.” In the next section we argue that such criticisms are ill founded.

It's time for the authors to again say negative things about language standardization, and promote a very relativistic view of languages and dialects. I will defend my views against their criticisms of such views. I don't know about a 'fixed' system, if they meant unchanging system, then i ofc don't agree that there is any unchanging system of standard english (or standard danish etc.). However, there is a kind of danish that is the most standard. It may be a good idea to speak as normal a version of a language as possible, becus this makes it the easiest for the listeners to understand what one is saying. The general idea is to avoid things that are peculiar to a small minority of the speakers of the relevant language. This includes everything: syntax, grammar, word choice, pronunciation, etc. Speaking a language with in the most common way is the standard version of that language, nothing else. It is actually possible that there is no regional dialect that speaks that way, but that doesn't matter. A standard version of a language need not be a regional dialect. A standard version of a language is also a necessity if one wants a relatively fonetic spelling system without lots of alternative forms. The idea is that one spells after the sound of the standard version of the language. -

No dialect, however, is more expressive, less corrupt, more logical, more complex, or more regular than any other dialect or language. They are sim- ply different. More precisely, dialects represent different set of rules or lexical items represented in the minds of its speakers. Any judgments, therefore, as to the superiority or inferiority of a particular dialect or language are social judg- ments, which have no linguistic or scientific basis. To illustrate the arbitrariness of “standard usage,” consider the English r-drop rule discussed earlier. Britain’s prestigious RP accent omits the r in words such as “car,” “far,” and “barn.” Thus an r-less pronunciation is thought to be better than the less prestigious rural dialects that maintain the r. However, r-drop in the northeast United States is generally considered substandard, and the more pres- tigious dialects preserve the r, though this was not true in the past when r-drop was considered more prestigious. This shows that there is nothing inherently bet- ter or worse about one pronunciation over another, but simply that one variant is perceived of as better or worse depending on a variety of social factors.

I don't care about the typical purist stuff like 'corruption', but they are certainly wrong that some dialects are not more complex or regular than others. I really don't know what makes people make these claims when they are so obviously false. I'll give a very brief example. Consider a language that has a verb. As it happens, this verb is irregular in one dialect and not so in another. If everything else is equal, then clearly the one dialect is more regular than the other (and less complex), and indeed, better. Their illustration is strange. First they say that they want to illustrate it, but then end up concluding that their example "shows that there is nothing inherently better or worse about one pronunciation over another, but simply that one variant is perceived of as better or worse depending on a variety of social factors" which is either trivially true becus of the clause about "social factors" (such clauses are almost never explained, in typical sociology fashion), or false becus these differences matter. If the difference is such that other speakers of the language from other dialects fail to understand one, then that is indeed worse, since the purpose of language is generally to be able to communicate. Obviously, if one is not trying to communicate with everyone using the language, this point is irrelevant. -

Constructions with multiple negatives akin to AAE He don’t know nothing are commonly found in languages of the world, including French, Italian, and the Engl ish of Chaucer, as i l lustrated in the epigraph from The Canterbury Tales. The multiple negatives of AAE are governed by rules of syntax and are not illogical.

While perhaps not 'illogical', they are redundant and so increase the complexity of a language without adding any increased expressiveness. This is a bad thing. - The authors spend some time discussing various differences between african american english (AAE) and standard american english (SAE). Some of these differences have relevance to complexity and expressive power, but i'm not knowledgeable enuf to comment on all of their points. -

The first—the whole-word approach—teaches children to recognize a vocab- ulary of some fifty to one hundred words by rote learning, often by seeing the words used repeatedly in a story, for example, Run, Spot, Run from the Dick and Jane series well-known to people who learned to read in the 1950s. Other words are acquired gradually. This approach does not teach children to “sound out” words according to the individual sounds that make up the words. Rather, it treats the written language as though it were a logographic system, such as Chinese, in which a single written character corresponds to a whole word or word root. In other words, the whole-word approach fails to take advantage of the fact that English (and the writing systems of most literate societies) is based on an alphabet, in which the symbols correspond to the individual sounds (roughly phonemes) of the language. This is ironic because alphabetic writing systems are the easiest to learn and are maximally efficient for transcribing any human language. (my bolding)

So much for their language relativism. -

Chapter 12

Another simplification is that the “dead ends”—languages that evolved and died leaving no offspring—are not included. We have already mentioned Hittite and Tocharian as two such Indo-European languages. The family tree also fails to show several intermediate stages that must have existed in the evolution of modern languages. Languages do not evolve abruptly, which is why comparisons with the genealogical trees of biology have limited usefulness. Finally, the dia- gram fails to show some Indo-European languages because of lack of space.

The authors give the impression that in biology, species do somehow evolve abruptly. But they do no such thing. The analogy works fine in that area. The main problem with the analogy is that languages can share 'genes' (words, etc.) between 'species' and this does not generally happen in biology. (At least, except for in bacteria?) -

 The term sound writing is sometimes used in place of alphabetic writing, but it does not truly represent the principle involved in the use of alphabets. One- sound ↔ one-letter is inefficient and unintuitive, because we do not need to represent the [pʰ] in pit and the [p] in spit by two different letters. It is confusing to represent nonphonemic differences in writing because the sounds are seldom perceptible to speakers. Except for the phonetic alphabets, whose function is to record the sounds of all languages for descriptive purposes, most, if not all, alphabets have been devised on the phonemic principle.

This is a good observation. I hadn't thought of that. I shud update my Lyddansk to fix the fonetic principle to the fonemic principle (in danish ofc). Another way of putting it in ordinary language is: one sound↔one symbol, but include only differences in sounds that are relevant. -

If writing represented the spoken language perfectly, spelling reforms would never have arisen. In chapter 6 we discussed some of the problems in the En  glish orthographic system. These problems prompted George Bernard Shaw to observe that:

[I]t was as a reading and writing animal that Man achieved his human eminence above those who are called beasts. Well, it is I and my like who have to do the writing. I have done it professionally for the last sixty years as well as it can be done with a hopelessly inadequate alphabet devised centuries before the English language existed to record another and very different language. Even this alphabet is reduced to absurdity by a foolish orthography based on the notion that the business of spelling is to represent the origin and history of a word instead of its sound and meaning. Thus an intelligent child who is bidden to spell debt, and very properly spells it d-e-t, is caned for not spelling it with a b because Julius Caesar spelt the Latin word for it with a b.

The source of the quote is given as: Shaw, G. B. 1948. Preface to R. A. Wilson, The miraculous birth of language. Anyway, this particular etymology is actually wrong too! There are many such false etymologies that people have based their spelling on. Very utterly foolish. Quoting Wikipedia:

From the 16th century onward, English writers who were scholars of Greek and Latin literature tried to link English words to their Graeco-Latin counterparts. They did this by adding silent letters to make the real or imagined links more obvious. Thus det became debt (to link it to Latin debitum), dout became doubt (to link it to Latin dubitare), sissors became scissors and sithe became scythe (as they were wrongly thought to come from Latin scindere), iland became island (as it was wrongly thought to come from Latin insula), ake became ache (as it was wrongly thought to come from Greek akhos), and so forth.[5][6]

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