Language Log

Yesterday I showed a pitch contour from one of Hillary Clinton's speeches ("Political /t/ lenition", 8/7/2016), and promised to take a broader look at her characteristic prosodic styles. But today I'm going to feature one of Donald's prosodic stylings. From the Trump/Pence rally in Des Moines, Iowa, 8/5/2016:

We're gonna use great business leaders
___to work with our generals —
we're gonna make great trade deals
___where we're getting absolutely killed —
with China
___and other countries —

Donald Trump deploys this pattern rarely but effectively — and I'd be surprised to hear it from Hillary Clinton.

Following up on Tim Kaine's mocking imitation of Donald Trump's phrase "believe me", CNN put up a comparison:

"Believe me." Tim Kaine's impression of Donald Trump vs. the mogul himself https://t.co/WpV3EgxtQz #DemsInPhilly https://t.co/q9ar1abkZW

— CNN (@CNN) July 28, 2016

My posts have been thin recently, mostly because over the past ten days or so I've been involved in the preparation and submission of five conference papers, on top of my usual commitments to teaching and meetings and visitors. Nobody's fault but mine, of course. Anyhow, this gives me some raw material that I'll try to present in a way that's comprehensible and interesting to non-specialists.

One of the papers, with Neville Ryant as first author, was an attempt to take advantage of a large collection of audiobook recordings to explore some dimensions of speaking style. The paper is still under review, so I'll wait to post a copy until its fate is decided — but there are some interesting ideas and suggestive results that I can share. And to motivate you to read the somewhat wonkish explanation that follows, I'll start off with a picture:

Following up on "Political sound and silence", 2/8/2016, here's a level plot of speech segment durations and immediately-following silence segment durations from William Carlos Williams' poetry reading at the Library of Congress in May of 1945:

As part of an exercise/demonstration for a course, last night I ran Neville Ryant's second-best speech activity detector (SAD) on Barack Obama's Weekly Radio Addresses for 2010 (50 of them), and George W. Bush's Weekly Radio Addresses for 2008 (48 of them). The distributions of speech and silence durations, via R's kernel density estimation function, look like this:

In my limited experience of French hiphop, I've gotten the impression that it's rhythmically rather "square", in the sense that the syncopations or polyrhythms that are common in the corresponding American genres are relatively rare. As a first tentative step in evaluating this (perhaps quite wrong) idea, I analyzed the word-to-beat alignments of MC Solaar's popular 2001 piece Solaar Pleure. Here's the official video on YouTube:

And there's a set of annotated lyrics at genius.com.

It would seem natural that all languages have diminutives, but how diminutives are formed in different languages must vary considerably.  In most cases that I'm aware of in Indo-European languages, the addition of a special suffix denoting smallness or connoting endearment is typical, but in other cases there are more complicated mechanisms at play.  The most elaborate system of diminutives I know of is Russian, where common given names are not only made into diminutives in irregular ways, they are then profusely elaborated (with some forms indicating doubled diminutiveness):  thus, Aleksander –> Sasha, Sashka, Sashen'ka, Sashechka, Sanya, Shura, Sashok.  Keeping track of all these variants was always one of the biggest challenges I faced in reading Russian novels.

Thanks to Bob Kennedy, I was able to find the full Jeopardy shows from November 23-24, and pull out the segments where the hosts "chats" with contestant Laura Ashby, whose in-game response's prosody ate the internet for a couple of days just before Thanksgiving ("Jeopardy gossip", 11/25/2015).

Here they are:

The internet has been working hard at providing Deborah Cameron with material for a book she might write on attitudes towards women's voices. (Background: "Un justified", 7/8/2015; "Cameron v. Wolf" 7/27/2015.)

To see what I mean, sample the tweets for  #JeopardyLaura, or read some of the old-media coverage, like "Is this woman the most annoying 'Jeopardy!' contestant ever?", Fox News 11/24/2015:

"Jeopardy!" contestant Laura Ashby is causing quite a stir on social media. The Marietta, Georgia, native isn't getting attention for her two-day winning streak but instead the tone of her voice.  

Ashby first appeared on the competition show on Nov. 6 and when she returned this week the Internet went crazy over her voice.

Several tweeters went out of their way to exemplify Cameron's observation that "This endless policing of women’s language—their voices, their intonation patterns, the words they use, their syntax—is uncomfortably similar to the way our culture polices women’s bodily appearance":

Everyone was so focused on #JeopardyLaura, no one noticed Disheveled Jeopardy Molly #Jeoprady pic.twitter.com/iTprsz5LA1

— Alive In Philly (@AliveInPhilly) November 25, 2015

We've often complained about the ignorant aftermath of E.B. White's ignorant 1959 incitement to which-hunting, which launched the idea that restrictive (or integrated, or defining) relative clauses in English should always and only be introduced by that, while non-restrictive (or supplementary, or non-defining) relative clauses should be introduced by which. (See "Reddit blewit" 12/24/2012 for details and additional links. Note that for simplicity, I'm considering only relative clauses with inanimate/nonhuman heads, though the fundamental point remains the same when we add who to the mix.)

My point today is that the whole distinction is a false one.

More exactly: The traditional restrictive/non-restrictive dichotomy merges distinct morphological, syntactic, semantic, prosodic, rhetorical, and psychological questions; the correlation among these different dimensions is loose at best; several of the relevant distinctions are gradient rather than categorical; and some of the distinctions are sometimes a matter of pragmatic vagueness rather than grammatical ambiguity.

If I'm right, then modern linguists have been committing White's sin in a less extreme form, trying to impose an over-simplified rationalist taxonomy on a more complex linguistic reality.

On a recent flight across the Atlantic, I watched a Hong Kong movie called Gangster Payday in English, 大茶飯 ("Big Tea Rice"?) in Chinese, directed by Lee Po-Cheung. One of the things that struck me was a particular pattern of pitch and time at the ends of certain phrases, involving elongation of the final syllable, typically on a mid-level pitch. It seems to come in bunches, and to occur on quite different phrase-final syllable sequences, so I'm guessing that it's an intonational pattern rather than a series of lexical tones.

The movie is available on YouTube, so I've pulled out a few examples of this phenomenon, in the hope that someone who knows Cantonese (and perhaps also the speech patterns of Hong Kong gangsters — or at least older Hong Kongers of lower-SES origin?) can explain it.

I don't have time for much this morning, but here's a plot of the f0 quantiles of the first minute or so of each of six speeches from the 2015 NRA-ILA Leadership Forum:

["F0", pronounced "eff zero", is a conventional designation for the fundamental frequency of the voice, which represents the rate of oscillation of the vocal folds in voiced speech, and is a physical proxy for the psychological dimension of "pitch". "Hz" is the standard abbreviation for "Hertz", the international unit of frequency (cycles per second) named after Heinrich Hertz.]

A couple of days ago, I mentioned ("Sarah Koenig", 2/5/2015) that David Talkin was releasing a new pitch tracking program called REAPER (available from github at the link). After a few minor improvements in documentation, it's ready for the general public.

The reaper program uses the EpochTracker class to simultaneously estimate the location of voiced-speech "epochs" or glottal closure instants (GCI), voicing state (voiced or unvoiced) and fundamental frequency (F0 or "pitch"). We define the local (instantaneous) F0 as the inverse of the time between successive GCI.

After trying it out, I can recommend it whole-heartedly — it's robust and accurate and fast. It's my new standard pitch tracker.