They say that Chinese is a rather hard language to learn, if you're a native speaker of an Indo-European language, e.g. English. I've recently had first-hand experience on learning elementary Chinese, and given my previous academic training as a linguist, I have a few observations.
Showing posts with label languages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label languages. Show all posts
26 May 2026
14 May 2026
Learning Languages as a Linguist
I have decided to do something different recently: I actually enrolled myself in a short-term Chinese language course in China. So for two weeks, I was sitting in a classroom in Chengdu learning Chinese for 6 hours a day, either within a group setting, or one-on-one. And I have to say, my former training as a linguist helped a lot!
16 January 2023
Giving Up on Duolingo
Back in December 2021, because I had some free time on my hands, I downloaded Duolingo and started learning Hungarian. And I must say, I did enjoy it for a while. It was fun, and it was using a part of my brain that otherwise I wasn't using, or at least it felt like it. But after about a year of learning via the app, I must say the motivation eventually faded away.
11 April 2022
Learning Hungarian
I decided to pick up another language. This time, I decided to learn Hungarian. And I must say, after almost two months, I have to say that I definitely feel like there were areas of my brain that haven't been used in a while, and now I am using them again.
03 March 2011
Linguistic Factoid No. 21: Plurality
Languages have mechanisms that allow people to indicate that there are more than one entity that is involved in a given utterance. In English, for example, indicating whether an entity is plural or not is important, important enough to have grammatical markers that do the job. We add -s after a word in most cases, and in other times, the verb form changes whether the subject is singular or plural.
06 February 2011
Linguistic Factoid No. 20: Inferences
The funny thing about human language is that people use language, which carries meaning, and yet they actually say (sometimes unintentionally) more than what the utterance's meaning actually carries. Here's one example.
01 June 2010
Linguistic Factoid No. 19: Register
Rarely do I blog about sociolinguistic concepts here in this series, due to the fact that sociolinguistics isn’t my field of research. I know stuff about it to a certain degree, perhaps just the basics, so don’t treat the information here as an authoritative one.
Anyway, on to register. This is a term that is associated with the phenomenon of having several styles of speech depending on the situation that the speaker is in. Most of the time, the speaker is faced with varying environments in speech, and the environment affects what type of speech the speaker engages in.
Let me illustrate this by example. A parent for example will talk to a toddler in what is called motherese, this high-pitched sing-song voice intended to be used targeting babies. This can be a type of register. The same speaker will talk differently to an older child. And the same speaker will also talk differently to a person of authority, for example, the President of the country.
Now why is this interesting to sociolinguists? Because several linguistic variables come into play whenever people move from one register to another. For example, I noticed that my father uses certain vocabulary in Tagalog whenever he prays. It seems that certain lexical entries that have commonplace meanings are only used in this environment, that is, speaking to an entity of perceived authority. One example is the lexical item suliranin, which is the Tagalog word for problem. I never hear my father use this word aside from praying. Whenever he needs to talk about a problem in other environments, then the Spanish loanword problema is used.
Linguistic politeness plays a huge role in shifting between registers. Yep, depending on one’s culture, certain registers dictate that speakers use politeness devices. Most languages have grammatical ways of indicating politeness, and these are used depending on what register the person is speaking in.
Due to the fact that I am not specializing in this area of research, I do not know to what extent certain linguistic variables change depending on what register the person is in. Perhaps, there is a language that dictates that the intonation contour should change depending on what register a person is in. That is quite imaginable. A more radical and hard-to-imagine scenario would be a language that dictates that certain sounds should not be used in a certain register. That would be hard, as the language would become lipogrammatic in nature. Perhaps these languages do not exist, but what do I know, as I am not a typologist.
.JPG)
(Streets of La Candelaria, from my Bogotá, Colombia Series)
Anyway, on to register. This is a term that is associated with the phenomenon of having several styles of speech depending on the situation that the speaker is in. Most of the time, the speaker is faced with varying environments in speech, and the environment affects what type of speech the speaker engages in.
Let me illustrate this by example. A parent for example will talk to a toddler in what is called motherese, this high-pitched sing-song voice intended to be used targeting babies. This can be a type of register. The same speaker will talk differently to an older child. And the same speaker will also talk differently to a person of authority, for example, the President of the country.
Now why is this interesting to sociolinguists? Because several linguistic variables come into play whenever people move from one register to another. For example, I noticed that my father uses certain vocabulary in Tagalog whenever he prays. It seems that certain lexical entries that have commonplace meanings are only used in this environment, that is, speaking to an entity of perceived authority. One example is the lexical item suliranin, which is the Tagalog word for problem. I never hear my father use this word aside from praying. Whenever he needs to talk about a problem in other environments, then the Spanish loanword problema is used.
Linguistic politeness plays a huge role in shifting between registers. Yep, depending on one’s culture, certain registers dictate that speakers use politeness devices. Most languages have grammatical ways of indicating politeness, and these are used depending on what register the person is speaking in.
Due to the fact that I am not specializing in this area of research, I do not know to what extent certain linguistic variables change depending on what register the person is in. Perhaps, there is a language that dictates that the intonation contour should change depending on what register a person is in. That is quite imaginable. A more radical and hard-to-imagine scenario would be a language that dictates that certain sounds should not be used in a certain register. That would be hard, as the language would become lipogrammatic in nature. Perhaps these languages do not exist, but what do I know, as I am not a typologist.
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11 March 2010
Linguistic Factoid No. 18: Case
In language, one needs to know who is doing what action to whom. So, if I tell you the sentence John saw Mary, you understand that John was the one who did the seeing, and Mary was the one who was seen. In English, you know this information due to the positional configuration of the nouns: John appears before the verb, and Mary appears after it.
However, not every language has a verb that appears at the middle of the two nouns that one can tell which one is doing what to the other. Some languages have the verb at the very end of the sentence, like in Japanese for example. And some other languages have the verb right at the very beginning of the sentence, like in Tagalog and other Philippine languages.
So how do these languages mark who is doing what to whom?
Well, there is the concept of case. Case marking is the way languages mark the performers of an action. So, in Japanese, one have suffixes that can mark who is doing what to whom. The same sentence above in English can be said in two ways in Japanese.
1) John-ga Mary-o mikaketa.
2) Mary-o John-ga mikaketa.
The verb is the final word of the sentence, and as you can see, you can even switch things around, but they mean the same thing (well, technically there is a difference, but that leads to the realm of pragmatics, which I am not discussing right now). In both sentences, it is John who did the seeing.
In Tagalog, one can see the same thing.
3) Nakita ni Juan si Maria.
4) Nakita si Maria ni Juan.
Tagalog has these little words that appear before the nouns which in effect marks who is doing who. The verb appears at the beginning of the sentence, and you can scramble the nouns all you want, but you can still maintain that John did the seeing and Mary was the one he saw due to the case markers that are attached to the nouns.
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(The Dome, from my Capitol Hill Series)
However, not every language has a verb that appears at the middle of the two nouns that one can tell which one is doing what to the other. Some languages have the verb at the very end of the sentence, like in Japanese for example. And some other languages have the verb right at the very beginning of the sentence, like in Tagalog and other Philippine languages.
So how do these languages mark who is doing what to whom?
Well, there is the concept of case. Case marking is the way languages mark the performers of an action. So, in Japanese, one have suffixes that can mark who is doing what to whom. The same sentence above in English can be said in two ways in Japanese.
1) John-ga Mary-o mikaketa.
2) Mary-o John-ga mikaketa.
The verb is the final word of the sentence, and as you can see, you can even switch things around, but they mean the same thing (well, technically there is a difference, but that leads to the realm of pragmatics, which I am not discussing right now). In both sentences, it is John who did the seeing.
In Tagalog, one can see the same thing.
3) Nakita ni Juan si Maria.
4) Nakita si Maria ni Juan.
Tagalog has these little words that appear before the nouns which in effect marks who is doing who. The verb appears at the beginning of the sentence, and you can scramble the nouns all you want, but you can still maintain that John did the seeing and Mary was the one he saw due to the case markers that are attached to the nouns.
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20 January 2010
Linguistic Factoid No. 17: Relative Clauses
Relative clauses are certain structures in language that are meant to enrich and modify the description of entities. These add descriptions to the entities in the sentence, namely, the subjects and the objects. Here is an example.
1. The dog chased the cat.
2. The dog chased the cat that ate the mouse.
In the first sentence, both entities are just regular plain old entities. However, in the second sentence, the object of the sentence has a relative clause attached to it. Now, in this case, what is the purpose of the relative clause? Well, it adds further information about the entity. So, in the discourse of the second sentence, it may be the case that there are two possible cats to talk about, but we are picking out of the two the cat that was involved in eating the mouse.
Relative clauses are one kind of extraction. Relative clauses are made by joining two clauses together, basically. There is a main clause, and the relative clause needs to have a missing argument, since this is basically the same entity as in the main clause. Thus, in the second sentence above, "ate the mouse" is actually the clause with a missing subject.
In many languages, the relative clause either have a missing subject or a missing object. Compare the following two sentences in English.
3. The cat that _____ ate the mouse went missing.
4. The cat that the dog chased _____ went missing.
Sentence 3 has a subject relative clause, while 4 has an object relative clause. So English allows extractions for both places. There are languages, however, that have restrictions on extraction. Tagalog, for example, is one such language where one can only extract the subject of the relative clause. Thus, object relative clauses do not exist in Tagalog. In order to extract the proper entity, one needs to modulate the voice of the relative clause in order to vary the subject, and then one can extract it.
Okay, that last bit must have sounded gibberish, since I am not providing any examples here. But hey, this isn't a research paper, so I guess this is enough. If you really are curious, then email me and I will be more than happy to give you examples and further explanation.
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(Optical Illusion, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)
1. The dog chased the cat.
2. The dog chased the cat that ate the mouse.
In the first sentence, both entities are just regular plain old entities. However, in the second sentence, the object of the sentence has a relative clause attached to it. Now, in this case, what is the purpose of the relative clause? Well, it adds further information about the entity. So, in the discourse of the second sentence, it may be the case that there are two possible cats to talk about, but we are picking out of the two the cat that was involved in eating the mouse.
Relative clauses are one kind of extraction. Relative clauses are made by joining two clauses together, basically. There is a main clause, and the relative clause needs to have a missing argument, since this is basically the same entity as in the main clause. Thus, in the second sentence above, "ate the mouse" is actually the clause with a missing subject.
In many languages, the relative clause either have a missing subject or a missing object. Compare the following two sentences in English.
3. The cat that _____ ate the mouse went missing.
4. The cat that the dog chased _____ went missing.
Sentence 3 has a subject relative clause, while 4 has an object relative clause. So English allows extractions for both places. There are languages, however, that have restrictions on extraction. Tagalog, for example, is one such language where one can only extract the subject of the relative clause. Thus, object relative clauses do not exist in Tagalog. In order to extract the proper entity, one needs to modulate the voice of the relative clause in order to vary the subject, and then one can extract it.
Okay, that last bit must have sounded gibberish, since I am not providing any examples here. But hey, this isn't a research paper, so I guess this is enough. If you really are curious, then email me and I will be more than happy to give you examples and further explanation.
.JPG)
25 December 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 16: Clefts
Syntax is the study of language structure at the sentence level. The field of linguistics (without delving into its inter-disciplinary connections) is composed of phonetics (the study of speech sounds), phonology (the study of sound systems in language), morphology (the study of word structure), syntax (the study of sentence structure), and semantics (the study of meaning). So obviously, plenty of people have studied many components of language, and depending on what fancies them, they know pretty much everything about that topic.
Anyway, in my past life, I used to dabble in syntax. Partly because in my undergraduate department, syntax was the big thing, and until I got to know the other parts of linguistics, I never knew anything else about the other sub-fields. Anyway, one thing that popped in my head the other day was how there is a plethora of sentential constructions out there. One of them are these things called clefts.
Last night, we watched this movie entitled Death at a Funeral. And I liked it, but my friend didn't. So we were discussing what it was that she didn't like. Anyway, I determined that it was the genre, which was black comedy, that she didn't like, and not the plot. So I uttered the following sentence: It's against black comedy that you are. Obviously, I am not a native speaker of English, so that sentence was weird and wrong, but I uttered it, and soon enough I realized that it was ungrammatical, but I couldn't chase it fast enough.
Apparently, one cannot cleft prepositional phrases. See, clefts are sentences that have constituents that appear in a non-regular position. Consider the following:
Non-cleft: I love cookies.
Cleft: It's cookies that I love.
Non-cleft: I wanted to drive an Audi.
Cleft: What I wanted to drive was an Audi.
English is interesting in that there is a variety of clefts available for the speaker to utilize. For more information on clefts, just see the literature available online, this has been a topic studied by syntacticians for a long time.
Now what motivates the use of cleft sentences? One hypothesis is topic structure. English usually is a language that has the subject in the beginning, followed by a predicate. However, this is oftentimes violated. The first thing that comes in the sentence usually is the subject, but it is not always the case that one wants to talk about the subject, since there are times in which the subject is not the most important thing in the discourse. There are times in which there are other things that are more important in the discourse aside from the subject, and important things are most of the time put at the beginning. That's why people use cleft sentences.
So, back at my ungrammatical sentence above. I figured that given the discourse that was unfolding at that time, the most important thing was the prepositional phrase against black comedy (as opposed to against the plot). So I constructed a sentence that clefted that phrase. However, the fact that I am not a native speaker allowed me to cleft a prepositional phrase and my grammar did not restrict that from being produced. So I ended up with the ungrammatical sentence above. But I realized that it was wrong, and I should have said It's black comedy that you are against.
.JPG)
(Moving Things, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)
Anyway, in my past life, I used to dabble in syntax. Partly because in my undergraduate department, syntax was the big thing, and until I got to know the other parts of linguistics, I never knew anything else about the other sub-fields. Anyway, one thing that popped in my head the other day was how there is a plethora of sentential constructions out there. One of them are these things called clefts.
Last night, we watched this movie entitled Death at a Funeral. And I liked it, but my friend didn't. So we were discussing what it was that she didn't like. Anyway, I determined that it was the genre, which was black comedy, that she didn't like, and not the plot. So I uttered the following sentence: It's against black comedy that you are. Obviously, I am not a native speaker of English, so that sentence was weird and wrong, but I uttered it, and soon enough I realized that it was ungrammatical, but I couldn't chase it fast enough.
Apparently, one cannot cleft prepositional phrases. See, clefts are sentences that have constituents that appear in a non-regular position. Consider the following:
Non-cleft: I love cookies.
Cleft: It's cookies that I love.
Non-cleft: I wanted to drive an Audi.
Cleft: What I wanted to drive was an Audi.
English is interesting in that there is a variety of clefts available for the speaker to utilize. For more information on clefts, just see the literature available online, this has been a topic studied by syntacticians for a long time.
Now what motivates the use of cleft sentences? One hypothesis is topic structure. English usually is a language that has the subject in the beginning, followed by a predicate. However, this is oftentimes violated. The first thing that comes in the sentence usually is the subject, but it is not always the case that one wants to talk about the subject, since there are times in which the subject is not the most important thing in the discourse. There are times in which there are other things that are more important in the discourse aside from the subject, and important things are most of the time put at the beginning. That's why people use cleft sentences.
So, back at my ungrammatical sentence above. I figured that given the discourse that was unfolding at that time, the most important thing was the prepositional phrase against black comedy (as opposed to against the plot). So I constructed a sentence that clefted that phrase. However, the fact that I am not a native speaker allowed me to cleft a prepositional phrase and my grammar did not restrict that from being produced. So I ended up with the ungrammatical sentence above. But I realized that it was wrong, and I should have said It's black comedy that you are against.
.JPG)
16 October 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 15: Language Families
There are about 6,000 languages around the world. Some of these are spoken by a huge amount of people, while some of these are spoken by just a small handful of people that are predicted to die within the next century. These languages are in a way related to each other, and if one had the time and effort, then one can simply sit down and figure out how languages relate to each other and which languages are close to each other or not.
Once upon a time, a linguist realized that English and Sanskrit were very much related. There were similar words across the two languages, and upon further scrutiny, it was found that English and Sanskrit are related. Thus, the world realized that there is one such language family called Indo-European. This language family extends from the Celtic languages in Ireland and Great Britain to the languages found in the Indian sub-continent.
How does one establish a language family? Well, people can examine how similar or different each languages' vocabulary is. People can examine a core vocabulary and see how much they vary. The words in this core vocabulary should be words that are thought to be highly resistant to borrowing, such as kin terms and body parts. One can also examine the syntax or word order of the languages. The more similar things are, the easier it is for people to establish the existence of a common language family across the languages.
So, what is the largest language family? Well, there is this language family called Niger-Congo, found in sub-Saharan Africa. This language family contains about 1,400 languages, extending from Senegal to South Africa. The second-largest language family is the Austronesian language family, which is posited to have originated in the island of Taiwan, and is now found along a wide swath of area, from Madagascar in the Indian Ocean to Easter Island in the South Pacific. There are 1,200 languages in this family, but the area coverage is very large.
Of course, there are language families that are smaller than these two. And there are also languages that do not belong to any language family. Theorists have claimed that Japanese is one such language, but this is not firmly established yet. Other languages, such as Basque (found in Spain and France) and Burushaski (found in Pakistan) are clearer to be language isolates, since they are clearly very unrelated to the languages that surround them.
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(Atrium, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)
Once upon a time, a linguist realized that English and Sanskrit were very much related. There were similar words across the two languages, and upon further scrutiny, it was found that English and Sanskrit are related. Thus, the world realized that there is one such language family called Indo-European. This language family extends from the Celtic languages in Ireland and Great Britain to the languages found in the Indian sub-continent.
How does one establish a language family? Well, people can examine how similar or different each languages' vocabulary is. People can examine a core vocabulary and see how much they vary. The words in this core vocabulary should be words that are thought to be highly resistant to borrowing, such as kin terms and body parts. One can also examine the syntax or word order of the languages. The more similar things are, the easier it is for people to establish the existence of a common language family across the languages.
So, what is the largest language family? Well, there is this language family called Niger-Congo, found in sub-Saharan Africa. This language family contains about 1,400 languages, extending from Senegal to South Africa. The second-largest language family is the Austronesian language family, which is posited to have originated in the island of Taiwan, and is now found along a wide swath of area, from Madagascar in the Indian Ocean to Easter Island in the South Pacific. There are 1,200 languages in this family, but the area coverage is very large.
Of course, there are language families that are smaller than these two. And there are also languages that do not belong to any language family. Theorists have claimed that Japanese is one such language, but this is not firmly established yet. Other languages, such as Basque (found in Spain and France) and Burushaski (found in Pakistan) are clearer to be language isolates, since they are clearly very unrelated to the languages that surround them.
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15 September 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 14: Hypernegation
So I was cleaning my office shelf yesterday, and while I was doing that, I found a very interesting piece of paper. It actually turned out to be the handout that I got for a talk that I attended in Berkeley, CA earlier this year. I was attending the 35th Annual Berkeley Linguistics Society and one of their guest speakers was Laurence Horn, who delivered a very interesting, and not to mention entertaining talk on negation, or rather, hypernegation. Thus, all the linguistic tidbits that I will be presenting in this entry are all courtesy of his handouts. And I should say right at the outset, that wow, he cites all of his sources, from Illinois politician Blagojevich to Mick Jagger.
Anyway, remember math? When you get a negative number, and multiply it with another negative number, the sign becomes positive? One would think that language would behave similarly, but in fact, that is not the case. Surprise surprise. Hypernegation refers to the fact in which there appears more than one negative marker in a certain proposition, such as a clause or a sentence. So, if language behaved like math, then this is what Horn calls duplex negatio affirmat, where the presence of two negatives cancel each other. He however does not cite any examples at least, which suggests that this indeed does not happen in language.
What is more common is duplex negatio negat, illustrated by the Mick Jagger song "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". Jagger surely did not mean that he gets satisfaction.
There's also the cases called duplex negatio not-so-affirmat, illustrated by people saying "not uncommon" which doesn't mean "common" or "not infrequent" which does not mean "frequent". He cites a 2000 episode of The Simpsons which featured an exchange between Bart and Homer, which went like this.
Bart: Dad, are you licking toads?
Homer: I'm not NOT licking toads. (with a stress on the second "not")
Homer's statement is usually interpreted as that he is doing something with toads, but not exactly licking them.
What are the other types of hypernegation? Well, one of the interesting ones is what Horn calls triplex negatio confundit, and examples include the following snippets.
"No detail was too small to overlook."
"There's nothing I don't ever wish I didn't say."
"I can't say I don't blame him."
So these examples, do you guys understand these? Or did it just confuse the heck out of you?
So what does this tell us? Language, no matter how systematic it may be, still has plenty of seemingly illogical nooks and crannies. Plenty of people have attempted to formalize language, and I have to say, I have been one of them, at least, I have attempted to do a formalistic description of certain linguistic phenomena in the past. But still, language can be bizarre, which draws the line between formal and natural languages.
.JPG)
(Red Engine, from my Air and Space Museum Series)
Anyway, remember math? When you get a negative number, and multiply it with another negative number, the sign becomes positive? One would think that language would behave similarly, but in fact, that is not the case. Surprise surprise. Hypernegation refers to the fact in which there appears more than one negative marker in a certain proposition, such as a clause or a sentence. So, if language behaved like math, then this is what Horn calls duplex negatio affirmat, where the presence of two negatives cancel each other. He however does not cite any examples at least, which suggests that this indeed does not happen in language.
What is more common is duplex negatio negat, illustrated by the Mick Jagger song "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". Jagger surely did not mean that he gets satisfaction.
There's also the cases called duplex negatio not-so-affirmat, illustrated by people saying "not uncommon" which doesn't mean "common" or "not infrequent" which does not mean "frequent". He cites a 2000 episode of The Simpsons which featured an exchange between Bart and Homer, which went like this.
Bart: Dad, are you licking toads?
Homer: I'm not NOT licking toads. (with a stress on the second "not")
Homer's statement is usually interpreted as that he is doing something with toads, but not exactly licking them.
What are the other types of hypernegation? Well, one of the interesting ones is what Horn calls triplex negatio confundit, and examples include the following snippets.
"No detail was too small to overlook."
"There's nothing I don't ever wish I didn't say."
"I can't say I don't blame him."
So these examples, do you guys understand these? Or did it just confuse the heck out of you?
So what does this tell us? Language, no matter how systematic it may be, still has plenty of seemingly illogical nooks and crannies. Plenty of people have attempted to formalize language, and I have to say, I have been one of them, at least, I have attempted to do a formalistic description of certain linguistic phenomena in the past. But still, language can be bizarre, which draws the line between formal and natural languages.
.JPG)
01 September 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 13: R
In many languages of the world, there is a sound that is usually represented by the Roman letter R. However, it is not the case that all sounds that are represented by this letter are all the same. Of the languages that I speak, there are at least three different types of sounds that are all represented by this letter.
Well, it is not accidental that various different sounds are represented by this letter. There are commonalities, and yet they still come out as different. Let me discuss each of them here.
There is the easiest one to produce, the so-called “tap”. This is a sound that is produced by simply hitting one’s alveolar ridge (the hard horizontal part one has behind the upper teeth) with the tip of the tongue. The Japanese R is like this. This is a very quick sound, and it cannot be prolonged, unlike M where you can vocalize it until you run out of breath. The Tagalog R is also the same. English also has this, but in different environments. English actually replaces other sounds with this sound, for example, the words “ladder” and “latter” are pronounced the same, with the middle consonant utilizing this sound, and so is “Adam” and “atom”.
Now what happens if you do this multiple times? Then you get a trill. This is a rather hard sound to make, and not all languages have these. This is hard due to the motor control that is needed to accomplish it, by having sufficient control on the tongue to make it vibrate up and down in a fast rate. I do not really know the exact motor process that is involved from the top of my head, since after all, I am not a phonetician. But yes, there are languages that use this sound, such as Spanish. In fact, Spanish has both the tap R and the alveolar trill R.
Not every trill is an alveolar trill. There are two more speech organs that can be trilled, and one of them still produces what is orthographically represented as an R. One can also trill the uvula, and this is the small flesh that hangs at the back of one’s throat. When this is trilled, it produces what is called a uvular trill, and this is also represented in various languages as R. French and Portuguese has this for example. I know this for a fact since both names of my adviser (who is French) and a co-author (who is Portuguese) has this sound.
There is one other R sound that I haven’t discussed. This is one of the mos rare sounds in the planet, and is very different from the ones discussed above. This is the retroflex R, which is done mainly by curling or bunching one’s tongue so that it forms a retracted position inside one’s mouth, accompanied by lip-rounding. Not a lot of languages do this, but it is featured in one language that is commonly spoken. This is also known as the English R. One other language that features this is Tamil. In fact, this sound makes a social distinction across the population, since apparently, only the educated can master this sound, and the laypeople will substitute this instead with an alveolar lateral sound, also known as L.
.JPG)
(Rocket Heads, from my Air and Space Museum Series)
Well, it is not accidental that various different sounds are represented by this letter. There are commonalities, and yet they still come out as different. Let me discuss each of them here.
There is the easiest one to produce, the so-called “tap”. This is a sound that is produced by simply hitting one’s alveolar ridge (the hard horizontal part one has behind the upper teeth) with the tip of the tongue. The Japanese R is like this. This is a very quick sound, and it cannot be prolonged, unlike M where you can vocalize it until you run out of breath. The Tagalog R is also the same. English also has this, but in different environments. English actually replaces other sounds with this sound, for example, the words “ladder” and “latter” are pronounced the same, with the middle consonant utilizing this sound, and so is “Adam” and “atom”.
Now what happens if you do this multiple times? Then you get a trill. This is a rather hard sound to make, and not all languages have these. This is hard due to the motor control that is needed to accomplish it, by having sufficient control on the tongue to make it vibrate up and down in a fast rate. I do not really know the exact motor process that is involved from the top of my head, since after all, I am not a phonetician. But yes, there are languages that use this sound, such as Spanish. In fact, Spanish has both the tap R and the alveolar trill R.
Not every trill is an alveolar trill. There are two more speech organs that can be trilled, and one of them still produces what is orthographically represented as an R. One can also trill the uvula, and this is the small flesh that hangs at the back of one’s throat. When this is trilled, it produces what is called a uvular trill, and this is also represented in various languages as R. French and Portuguese has this for example. I know this for a fact since both names of my adviser (who is French) and a co-author (who is Portuguese) has this sound.
There is one other R sound that I haven’t discussed. This is one of the mos rare sounds in the planet, and is very different from the ones discussed above. This is the retroflex R, which is done mainly by curling or bunching one’s tongue so that it forms a retracted position inside one’s mouth, accompanied by lip-rounding. Not a lot of languages do this, but it is featured in one language that is commonly spoken. This is also known as the English R. One other language that features this is Tamil. In fact, this sound makes a social distinction across the population, since apparently, only the educated can master this sound, and the laypeople will substitute this instead with an alveolar lateral sound, also known as L.
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14 August 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 12: Vowel Harmony
Ah, ever heard of this term? It sounds a little Zen, isn't it?
Well, vowel harmony is a type of long-distance phonological assimilatory process that can occur most of the time within the word domain, but sometimes in phrases as well. Now let me translate that sentence in English. It simply means that given a certain word, there are times in which the form of a certain vowel changes depending on other vowel forms in a word.
I suppose this is better discussed by discussing affixes first.
You know how in words, one can make a new word by adding an affix to it? Say, in English, in order to make a plural, one adds a -s? Okay, got that? Now, some languages have plenty of suffixes, of the form -VC, where "V" stands for vowel, and "C" stands for whatever consonant it is. Of course, there are other forms of these in varying lengths. However, what is interesting is that the form of the vowel is not fixed. In some words, it may be "a" in others it may be "e" and so on.
I suppose an approximate English example of this is the choice of "a" or "an" as an article. One uses "a" in front of a noun, unless the noun begins in a vowel sound. So it is "an honor" to eat "an apple" and so forth. The form of the article depends on another unit.
Vowel harmony is like that, except that the change isn't the presence or absence of a letter/sound, but on the quality of the vowel. Unfortunately, English does not do this.
So, where can people find languages that do this? Two countries come to mind: Finland and Hungary. That is because Finnish and Hungarian are the two most-spoken languages in the Uralic language family, and this family is known for big-time vowel harmony. Another language family in which vowel harmony is prominent is Turkic, so Turkish and all its linguistic relatives in Central Asia have this trait as well.
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(The Cavalry Up Close, from my DC Memorials Series)
Well, vowel harmony is a type of long-distance phonological assimilatory process that can occur most of the time within the word domain, but sometimes in phrases as well. Now let me translate that sentence in English. It simply means that given a certain word, there are times in which the form of a certain vowel changes depending on other vowel forms in a word.
I suppose this is better discussed by discussing affixes first.
You know how in words, one can make a new word by adding an affix to it? Say, in English, in order to make a plural, one adds a -s? Okay, got that? Now, some languages have plenty of suffixes, of the form -VC, where "V" stands for vowel, and "C" stands for whatever consonant it is. Of course, there are other forms of these in varying lengths. However, what is interesting is that the form of the vowel is not fixed. In some words, it may be "a" in others it may be "e" and so on.
I suppose an approximate English example of this is the choice of "a" or "an" as an article. One uses "a" in front of a noun, unless the noun begins in a vowel sound. So it is "an honor" to eat "an apple" and so forth. The form of the article depends on another unit.
Vowel harmony is like that, except that the change isn't the presence or absence of a letter/sound, but on the quality of the vowel. Unfortunately, English does not do this.
So, where can people find languages that do this? Two countries come to mind: Finland and Hungary. That is because Finnish and Hungarian are the two most-spoken languages in the Uralic language family, and this family is known for big-time vowel harmony. Another language family in which vowel harmony is prominent is Turkic, so Turkish and all its linguistic relatives in Central Asia have this trait as well.
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14 July 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 11: Syntactic Arguments
Four years ago, I once thought that I would be a syntactician. But hey, things happened, and then semantics just crept up on me, and now, I do psycholinguistics. I still like syntax, but I find other things that are more interesting than it.
Anyway, let's talk about syntax. Syntax is the subfield in linguistics that deals with how words are combined to make phrases and sentences. Various topics are covered here, and so let us try to tackle the basics with this post.
Languages usually have one privileged syntactic argument per sentence. In plain terms, there should always be a subject. So, in the English sentence John likes Mary and Bob, the subject of that sentence is John.
How do we know this? Because there are certain tests that we can do, one involving agreement. The form of the verb is dependent on a certain entity, and it is the subject, at least in English. If the sentence were John and Mary like Bob then the verb is different because the subject is not singular any more.
There are languages that allow sentences to have no subjects. English is not one of them, so in the sentence It is raining, the subject it is a dummy subject. It does not do anything semantically, it simply is inserted there to fulfill the English requirement that there should be a subject in every sentence. But other languages allow absence of a subject, such as Spanish and Italian, and various Austronesian languages.
Another syntactic argument is the object, which typically is the entity in which the action is done to. So, in the sentence John slapped Mary, the entity that the action was performed on is Mary, which is the object of the sentence.
There is a high occurrence of the subject being the entity that does the action, but it is not always the case. Consider Mary was slapped by John. The subject is Mary but she is not the entity that did the action. So syntactic arguments such as subject and object are not the same as semantic roles of agent and patient (but that is for another post).
There is also the third argument, which goes by various names. Some call it the indirect object, dative, recipient, what have you. So, in the sentence John sent Mary some chocolate, Mary is the third argument. This is used whenever there is a verb that takes three arguments.
The nice thing about these arguments is that you can invert them and make new sentences out of it. Such as Mary was sent some chocolate by John or Some chocolate was sent Mary by John (is that grammatical?)
How about This dissertation is driving me nuts? Can we say I am being driven nuts by this dissertation? Or how about Nuts are being driven me by this dissertation?
Let's talk about syntactic operations in a future post, shall we?
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(Behind the Metal Queue, from my DC Memorials Series)
Anyway, let's talk about syntax. Syntax is the subfield in linguistics that deals with how words are combined to make phrases and sentences. Various topics are covered here, and so let us try to tackle the basics with this post.
Languages usually have one privileged syntactic argument per sentence. In plain terms, there should always be a subject. So, in the English sentence John likes Mary and Bob, the subject of that sentence is John.
How do we know this? Because there are certain tests that we can do, one involving agreement. The form of the verb is dependent on a certain entity, and it is the subject, at least in English. If the sentence were John and Mary like Bob then the verb is different because the subject is not singular any more.
There are languages that allow sentences to have no subjects. English is not one of them, so in the sentence It is raining, the subject it is a dummy subject. It does not do anything semantically, it simply is inserted there to fulfill the English requirement that there should be a subject in every sentence. But other languages allow absence of a subject, such as Spanish and Italian, and various Austronesian languages.
Another syntactic argument is the object, which typically is the entity in which the action is done to. So, in the sentence John slapped Mary, the entity that the action was performed on is Mary, which is the object of the sentence.
There is a high occurrence of the subject being the entity that does the action, but it is not always the case. Consider Mary was slapped by John. The subject is Mary but she is not the entity that did the action. So syntactic arguments such as subject and object are not the same as semantic roles of agent and patient (but that is for another post).
There is also the third argument, which goes by various names. Some call it the indirect object, dative, recipient, what have you. So, in the sentence John sent Mary some chocolate, Mary is the third argument. This is used whenever there is a verb that takes three arguments.
The nice thing about these arguments is that you can invert them and make new sentences out of it. Such as Mary was sent some chocolate by John or Some chocolate was sent Mary by John (is that grammatical?)
How about This dissertation is driving me nuts? Can we say I am being driven nuts by this dissertation? Or how about Nuts are being driven me by this dissertation?
Let's talk about syntactic operations in a future post, shall we?
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21 June 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 10: Expectation
Have you ever imagined what the human language processing system is like? How it operates, and what the mechanisms that are involved are like? Well, for this factoid, I am talking about expectation and anticipation.
You see, humans are very intelligent beings. They have the ability to do higher cognitive functions, like speaking a language, and thinking. And this language processing system isn't a passive system: it does not simply sit there in your head and wait for input. Instead, it can be quite active, and anticipate what will come next, based on the received input up to that point.
One illustration: Finish this sentence, by filling in the blank.
The current US President is _______________.
Obviously, as of today, the correct answer is Barack Obama. Everyone who is updated with the world affairs will answer that way. Now, what did I just illustrate? If I presented that sentence to you orally, instead of in a written form, and suppose I didn't say beforehand that you should finish the sentence, if I hesitated a bit, to the point that it welcomed a continuation from someone else, then that someone else would still say Barack Obama. One's knowledge of the world is activated and supplies the correct answer. So, from a "passive" hearer, one becomes a speaker.
Here's another illustration. Read the following discourse.
John was surprised at the traffic jam on his way to work. He was so irritated that he lifted up the truck and went on his way.
Now was that sentence weird? Yes. Unless John is a superhero, that doesn't happen in real world. Now contrast that discourse with the following one.
John was surprised at the traffic jam on his way to work. He was so irritated that he glared at the truck and went on his way.
Now that one was more believable. In fact, several researchers constructed experimental stimuli like this, and they asked people to read these sentences, as these sentences were being presented on a computer screen. And as they were reading, their brain waves were being measured, and guess what? Several brain wave patterns spike up when they see that anomalous word, indicating that it was a violation of expectation. The following is also a similar paradigm.
I drink my coffee with milk and sugar/dog.
The above experimental item was in fact one of the items that were used in a landmark experiment on brain waves and language processing (also known as ERP) back in 1980. Kutas and Hillyard 1980, which was an article published in Science discovered the N400 wave, which is a negative brain wave pattern that appears approximately 400 millseconds after the presentation of the critical stimulus. A heightened N400 wave suggests that there was a semantic anomaly, and that the language processor was not expecting that input.
Finally, another piece of evidence regarding expectation comes from eye movement studies. Researchers such as Yuki Kamide have conducted series of experiments showing people what is called a visual-world paradigm. This is an array of objects presented on a computer screen, while the participant is listening to a sentence. It has been found in these experiments that people anticipate what is going to occur next, again based on their real-world knowledge. For example, Kamide etal 2003 reports an experiment, where in one item, they have a picture of a girl, a man, a merry-go-round, and a motorcycle in one array. Participants then heard sentences like the following.
The girl will ride the merry-go-round.
The man will ride the motorcycle.
Even before hearing what the object is, people already direct their eyes to the appropriate vehicle. If they hear girl, there would be a higher proportion of looks to the merry-go-round than the motorcycle, and vice versa for the times when they hear man. This is evidence that humans' knowledge of how the world operates have a great effect in language processing, up to the point that they anticipate what is going to occur next even before they actually encounter the input.
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(Tired Soldier, from my DC Memorials Series)
You see, humans are very intelligent beings. They have the ability to do higher cognitive functions, like speaking a language, and thinking. And this language processing system isn't a passive system: it does not simply sit there in your head and wait for input. Instead, it can be quite active, and anticipate what will come next, based on the received input up to that point.
One illustration: Finish this sentence, by filling in the blank.
The current US President is _______________.
Obviously, as of today, the correct answer is Barack Obama. Everyone who is updated with the world affairs will answer that way. Now, what did I just illustrate? If I presented that sentence to you orally, instead of in a written form, and suppose I didn't say beforehand that you should finish the sentence, if I hesitated a bit, to the point that it welcomed a continuation from someone else, then that someone else would still say Barack Obama. One's knowledge of the world is activated and supplies the correct answer. So, from a "passive" hearer, one becomes a speaker.
Here's another illustration. Read the following discourse.
John was surprised at the traffic jam on his way to work. He was so irritated that he lifted up the truck and went on his way.
Now was that sentence weird? Yes. Unless John is a superhero, that doesn't happen in real world. Now contrast that discourse with the following one.
John was surprised at the traffic jam on his way to work. He was so irritated that he glared at the truck and went on his way.
Now that one was more believable. In fact, several researchers constructed experimental stimuli like this, and they asked people to read these sentences, as these sentences were being presented on a computer screen. And as they were reading, their brain waves were being measured, and guess what? Several brain wave patterns spike up when they see that anomalous word, indicating that it was a violation of expectation. The following is also a similar paradigm.
I drink my coffee with milk and sugar/dog.
The above experimental item was in fact one of the items that were used in a landmark experiment on brain waves and language processing (also known as ERP) back in 1980. Kutas and Hillyard 1980, which was an article published in Science discovered the N400 wave, which is a negative brain wave pattern that appears approximately 400 millseconds after the presentation of the critical stimulus. A heightened N400 wave suggests that there was a semantic anomaly, and that the language processor was not expecting that input.
Finally, another piece of evidence regarding expectation comes from eye movement studies. Researchers such as Yuki Kamide have conducted series of experiments showing people what is called a visual-world paradigm. This is an array of objects presented on a computer screen, while the participant is listening to a sentence. It has been found in these experiments that people anticipate what is going to occur next, again based on their real-world knowledge. For example, Kamide etal 2003 reports an experiment, where in one item, they have a picture of a girl, a man, a merry-go-round, and a motorcycle in one array. Participants then heard sentences like the following.
The girl will ride the merry-go-round.
The man will ride the motorcycle.
Even before hearing what the object is, people already direct their eyes to the appropriate vehicle. If they hear girl, there would be a higher proportion of looks to the merry-go-round than the motorcycle, and vice versa for the times when they hear man. This is evidence that humans' knowledge of how the world operates have a great effect in language processing, up to the point that they anticipate what is going to occur next even before they actually encounter the input.
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27 May 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 9: Recursion
So what is recursion? Recursion, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is the property of a certain rule in which the output of the rule can serve as input to the same rule. I suppose this is best illustrated by a formula. So, let's build a sentence. These are the following rules for building a sentence.
Sentence = NP + VP
Noun Phrase = (Det) + N
Verb Phrase = V + (NP)
Using the above rules, we can build the following sentences.
1. John slept.
2. John saw Mary.
3. The man slept.
4. The man saw the woman.
However, there are plenty of other sentences that are possible, at least in English. Let us add another rule or two.
Verb Phrase = V + (CP)
Complement Phrase = C + S
Using these rules, we can now build the following sentences.
5. John knew that Mary saw the woman.
6. The man thought that John knew the answer.
7. My sister knows that I know that she knows that I am a jerk.
Now, notice the application of the rules in a recursive fashion. The rule that generates a complement phrase gives a sentence as an output, which then allows one to generate a new sentence again, and again, and again. Here are other examples of recursion. For ease of exposition, I added brackets as necessary.
8. I saw [the dog that chased [the cat that killed [the mouse that ate the cheese]]].
I could go on and on and on with this, describing each noun with a modifier. However, not all recursions can be infinite. There are times in which having multiple embedded stuff can make processing difficult, and one such example is center-embedding, where the recursive material is inside the sentence, not at the edge. I will illustrate this one by one, for ease of interpretation.
9. The mouse ate the cheese.
10. The [mouse that the cat killed] ate the cheese.
11. The [mouse that [the cat that the dog chased] killed] ate the cheese.
12. The [mouse that [the cat that [the dog that the city impounded] chased] killed] ate the cheese.
Who here still understands what the last sentence means?
Anyway, some linguists, notably Noam Chomsky, argues that recursion is one of the most fundamental aspects of language, and by having recursion possible, one can generate an infinite number of sentences using just simple finite rules. Other linguists, however, such as Daniel Everett, challenges this view, using data from other languages such as Piraha, in which there apparently is no use of recursion. If this is the case, then recursion cannot be universal. Obviously, the debate is more complicated than how I outlined it here, and it is keeping linguists busy. In fact, linguists who find this aspect of language fascinating are having a conference right this moment, in UMass Amherst. We'll see how this plays out.
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(Weird Contraption, from my National Gallery of Art Series)
Sentence = NP + VP
Noun Phrase = (Det) + N
Verb Phrase = V + (NP)
Using the above rules, we can build the following sentences.
1. John slept.
2. John saw Mary.
3. The man slept.
4. The man saw the woman.
However, there are plenty of other sentences that are possible, at least in English. Let us add another rule or two.
Verb Phrase = V + (CP)
Complement Phrase = C + S
Using these rules, we can now build the following sentences.
5. John knew that Mary saw the woman.
6. The man thought that John knew the answer.
7. My sister knows that I know that she knows that I am a jerk.
Now, notice the application of the rules in a recursive fashion. The rule that generates a complement phrase gives a sentence as an output, which then allows one to generate a new sentence again, and again, and again. Here are other examples of recursion. For ease of exposition, I added brackets as necessary.
8. I saw [the dog that chased [the cat that killed [the mouse that ate the cheese]]].
I could go on and on and on with this, describing each noun with a modifier. However, not all recursions can be infinite. There are times in which having multiple embedded stuff can make processing difficult, and one such example is center-embedding, where the recursive material is inside the sentence, not at the edge. I will illustrate this one by one, for ease of interpretation.
9. The mouse ate the cheese.
10. The [mouse that the cat killed] ate the cheese.
11. The [mouse that [the cat that the dog chased] killed] ate the cheese.
12. The [mouse that [the cat that [the dog that the city impounded] chased] killed] ate the cheese.
Who here still understands what the last sentence means?
Anyway, some linguists, notably Noam Chomsky, argues that recursion is one of the most fundamental aspects of language, and by having recursion possible, one can generate an infinite number of sentences using just simple finite rules. Other linguists, however, such as Daniel Everett, challenges this view, using data from other languages such as Piraha, in which there apparently is no use of recursion. If this is the case, then recursion cannot be universal. Obviously, the debate is more complicated than how I outlined it here, and it is keeping linguists busy. In fact, linguists who find this aspect of language fascinating are having a conference right this moment, in UMass Amherst. We'll see how this plays out.
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12 May 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 8: Iconicity
I haven't written any of my linguistic factoid entries recently, the last one being back in February. So I suppose I could write one for today.
And for today, the topic that I have chosen is iconicity.
Now what does this topic have to do with linguistics? The thing is, language is such as marvelous human faculty, and it lets us do many different things. It lets us ask questions, it lets us describe things, and it lets us command other humans. Language is a very interesting tool that us humans have, something that other beings such as animals don't, given the fact that they do not have the ability to do some higher level cognition.
Anyway, what does iconicity have to do with language? Well, iconicity refers to the fact that events are described in the order that they occurred. So, for example, if you ask a schoolgirl what happened in school, she would probably say the following.
I boarded the bus, then I saw my best friend, then we went to class, and the teacher showed us a very pretty book.
The order of the presentation of the events in the narrative roughly corresponds to the actual order of the events. However, that is not the only possible way of stating what happened. Different languages in fact have different ways of encoding events, and sometimes, the language allows us to encode events without following the actual order of occurrence. In English, for example, this language allows us to construct non-iconic discourse by making use of the pluperfect.
John got into an accident. He had been drinking heavily the night before.
In the above case, the drinking event was in fact temporally situated before the accident, but English allows us to construct a discourse where the event order does not match the presentational order of the events.
The curious thing is, not all languages do that. In fact, other scholars argue that there are some languages that only permit an iconic narration of events, one of those languages being Yucatec Mayan. This language happens to be a tenseless one, in the sense that the information as to whether an event occurred in the present or in the past is not encoded grammatically. In this language, narrations always take the order the events happened, and violations of this event order are not permitted.
From a processing point of view, it seems that iconic discourse is easier to understand. Several decades ago, psycholinguists have studied children in how they understand temporal connectives like before or after. It seems that very young children do not comprehend these connectives at all. If I remember correctly, it was Eve Clark who did experiments like these, where she asked very young children to act out certain scenarios, such as the following.
The boy picked up the teddy bear, before/after he patted the rabbit.
If I remember my bibliography right, she found out that very young children use an order-of-mention heuristic when performing the tasks. In other words, whatever action was mentioned first was understood to have happened first, without actually comprehending the meaning of the temporal connective. It is not until ages 4 or 5 that the full import of the temporal connectives are understood.
So there, I suppose one can make up a story why iconic discourse is easier to process than non-iconic discourse. In fact, it is this exact phenomenon that I as a researcher am interested in: what are the processing costs that comprehenders incur whenever they encounter non-iconic discourse? What are the factors that allow people to construct non-iconic discourse? To the extent that non-iconic discourse is possible within a language, how much of a violation is it in quantificational terms? Are there other factors that one can manipulate so that comprehenders would be more likely to expect a non-iconic discourse and therefore reduce the processing cost upon encountering one? If you are interested in this, you can contact me, and I can give you the correct bibliographic sources.
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(Marble Garden, from my National Gallery of Art Series)
And for today, the topic that I have chosen is iconicity.
Now what does this topic have to do with linguistics? The thing is, language is such as marvelous human faculty, and it lets us do many different things. It lets us ask questions, it lets us describe things, and it lets us command other humans. Language is a very interesting tool that us humans have, something that other beings such as animals don't, given the fact that they do not have the ability to do some higher level cognition.
Anyway, what does iconicity have to do with language? Well, iconicity refers to the fact that events are described in the order that they occurred. So, for example, if you ask a schoolgirl what happened in school, she would probably say the following.
I boarded the bus, then I saw my best friend, then we went to class, and the teacher showed us a very pretty book.
The order of the presentation of the events in the narrative roughly corresponds to the actual order of the events. However, that is not the only possible way of stating what happened. Different languages in fact have different ways of encoding events, and sometimes, the language allows us to encode events without following the actual order of occurrence. In English, for example, this language allows us to construct non-iconic discourse by making use of the pluperfect.
John got into an accident. He had been drinking heavily the night before.
In the above case, the drinking event was in fact temporally situated before the accident, but English allows us to construct a discourse where the event order does not match the presentational order of the events.
The curious thing is, not all languages do that. In fact, other scholars argue that there are some languages that only permit an iconic narration of events, one of those languages being Yucatec Mayan. This language happens to be a tenseless one, in the sense that the information as to whether an event occurred in the present or in the past is not encoded grammatically. In this language, narrations always take the order the events happened, and violations of this event order are not permitted.
From a processing point of view, it seems that iconic discourse is easier to understand. Several decades ago, psycholinguists have studied children in how they understand temporal connectives like before or after. It seems that very young children do not comprehend these connectives at all. If I remember correctly, it was Eve Clark who did experiments like these, where she asked very young children to act out certain scenarios, such as the following.
The boy picked up the teddy bear, before/after he patted the rabbit.
If I remember my bibliography right, she found out that very young children use an order-of-mention heuristic when performing the tasks. In other words, whatever action was mentioned first was understood to have happened first, without actually comprehending the meaning of the temporal connective. It is not until ages 4 or 5 that the full import of the temporal connectives are understood.
So there, I suppose one can make up a story why iconic discourse is easier to process than non-iconic discourse. In fact, it is this exact phenomenon that I as a researcher am interested in: what are the processing costs that comprehenders incur whenever they encounter non-iconic discourse? What are the factors that allow people to construct non-iconic discourse? To the extent that non-iconic discourse is possible within a language, how much of a violation is it in quantificational terms? Are there other factors that one can manipulate so that comprehenders would be more likely to expect a non-iconic discourse and therefore reduce the processing cost upon encountering one? If you are interested in this, you can contact me, and I can give you the correct bibliographic sources.
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27 February 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 7: Semantic Relatedness
How do you know that one word is related to another word? So, are the words animal and bird related? How about spoon and fork? How about restaurant and wine?
People have tried to see whether these words actually have a special relationship in our mind. And most of the time, they test these claims by devising priming studies. These studies consist of giving people a certain stimulus, called a prime, and then they observe the time the person reacts to another stimulus, namely, the target. The idea is, if these two words are related, then when you see the first word, then the second word gets activated as well, and therefore it takes less time for a person to recognize that word than an unrelated word.
Most people have actually devised these experiments, and they have found that the activation actually varies depending on what type of relation a pair of words has. So, words that belong to the same superordinate, such as turkey and goose (they are both animals) prime each other, but words that are just related to the same script or scenario, such as restaurant and wine don't prime as much.
People who do research on these usually have a larger research program that involves seeing the architecture of the brain. These studies usually give light as to how our worlds are organized in our heads.
So, how do you see the world?
.JPG)
(Embassies of Kenya and Armenia, from my Embassy Row Series)
People have tried to see whether these words actually have a special relationship in our mind. And most of the time, they test these claims by devising priming studies. These studies consist of giving people a certain stimulus, called a prime, and then they observe the time the person reacts to another stimulus, namely, the target. The idea is, if these two words are related, then when you see the first word, then the second word gets activated as well, and therefore it takes less time for a person to recognize that word than an unrelated word.
Most people have actually devised these experiments, and they have found that the activation actually varies depending on what type of relation a pair of words has. So, words that belong to the same superordinate, such as turkey and goose (they are both animals) prime each other, but words that are just related to the same script or scenario, such as restaurant and wine don't prime as much.
People who do research on these usually have a larger research program that involves seeing the architecture of the brain. These studies usually give light as to how our worlds are organized in our heads.
So, how do you see the world?
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10 February 2009
Linguistic Factoid No. 6: Scrambling
Ever wondered why different languages are arranged differently? You know, how other languages have the subject appearing first, and then the verb, and then the object?
If you understand English, which is duh, you're reading this blog in the first place, so I assume you do, well, anyway, you may have noticed that the doer of the action usually appears first. So the following two sentences have two different meanings.
1. Bob kissed Mary.
2. Mary kissed Bob.
In English, the position of the nouns tell you what the desired action is. So in the above examples, the first noun tells you that it is the one who did the action.
However, it is not always the case that the first noun is the doer of the action. So you can have sentences that have focused elements, or sentences in a different voice, such as the passive, like the following examples.
3. As for Mary, I hate her.
4. Mary was kissed by Bob.
Mary appears as the first noun in the above two sentences, but she is not the one doing the hating, nor the kissing.
Although, one can say that these are not the default sentence patterns of English. However, in other languages, this is not the case. There are languages that can easily mix and move around their nouns. Examples include languages in the Uralic and Altaic family, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish. East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean can also do this.
So English speakers may ask: how do they keep track of who is doing what if the nouns can move around? Well, unlike English, these languages that permit scrambling have markers on the nouns that tell the hearer what role this noun has. So the doer of the action usually has a suffix that indicates that it is the doer of the action. The receiver of the action also has a suffix indicating that it is the receiver of the action. So, wherever the nouns appear in the sentence, because of the fact that it is marked for its role, then one can simply scramble things around and it would still make sense.
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(Anderson House, from my Embassy Row Series)
If you understand English, which is duh, you're reading this blog in the first place, so I assume you do, well, anyway, you may have noticed that the doer of the action usually appears first. So the following two sentences have two different meanings.
1. Bob kissed Mary.
2. Mary kissed Bob.
In English, the position of the nouns tell you what the desired action is. So in the above examples, the first noun tells you that it is the one who did the action.
However, it is not always the case that the first noun is the doer of the action. So you can have sentences that have focused elements, or sentences in a different voice, such as the passive, like the following examples.
3. As for Mary, I hate her.
4. Mary was kissed by Bob.
Mary appears as the first noun in the above two sentences, but she is not the one doing the hating, nor the kissing.
Although, one can say that these are not the default sentence patterns of English. However, in other languages, this is not the case. There are languages that can easily mix and move around their nouns. Examples include languages in the Uralic and Altaic family, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish. East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean can also do this.
So English speakers may ask: how do they keep track of who is doing what if the nouns can move around? Well, unlike English, these languages that permit scrambling have markers on the nouns that tell the hearer what role this noun has. So the doer of the action usually has a suffix that indicates that it is the doer of the action. The receiver of the action also has a suffix indicating that it is the receiver of the action. So, wherever the nouns appear in the sentence, because of the fact that it is marked for its role, then one can simply scramble things around and it would still make sense.
.JPG)
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