Language Log

One reason that I was so interested in San Duanmu's work on Chinese "elastic words" is that I'm in the middle of reading Perry Link's recent book An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics.

During my recent visit to Michigan, San Duanmu told me about some really neat work that he published last year as "Word-length preferences in Chinese: a corpus study", Journal of East Asian Linguistics 21.1: 89-114, 2012.

Following up on "Versing" (6/19/2012)  and "Vers(e|u)s" (6/20/2012), here are the perception-test results from the 56 people who sent me their answers before I posted the answer key.

Some overall statistics follow.

Like other regular readers of Andrew Sullivan's web log, I was not surprised that he was happy about Sarah Palin's decision not to run for U.S. president in 2012. However, one aspect of his commentary ("Rejoice!", 10/5/2011) did surprise me. The puzzle is in the second sentence:

Our Three Year National Nightmare Is Over!

Palin talks to Mark Levin here (her voice is the deeper one).

Mark Levin is a radio talk show host, and Sullivan's link goes to a page on Levin's web site that includes not only the text of Palin's statement, but also accesses an mp3 file of a 15-minute segment of his show. My interest here, of course, is not in the politics but in the phonetics. Is it really true that Sarah Palin's voice is deeper (i.e. lower in pitch) than Mark Levin's?

FDR had his weekly "Fireside chats", and in 1982 Ronald Reagan began the modern tradition of weekly presidential addresses, which U.S. presidents since then have maintained. I don't think that very many people actually listen to these things — no one that I've asked has ever admitted to regular consumption. But I've been collecting them since 2004, and listening to most of them, and a few days ago I noticed something.

Whenever I visit England, I'm struck by the fact that escalators, moving walkways, and other public conveyances commonly have signs requiring users to carry dogs. I also always remember Martin Kay's observation that phrasal stress on the subject ("DOGS must be carried") suggests the absurd interpretation that "you can't use this facility unless you are carrying a dog", whereas stress on the verb remains consistent with the intended meaning "if you have a dog, you must carry it rather than have it go on its own feet".

There are several linguistic puzzles here. The first one is how to represent and explain the ambiguity in interpretation. One possibility is that there's an implicit universally quantified agent, "Dogs must be carried [by everyone]", which in any case needs to be contextually limited to "everyone using this facility", and then may or may not be further restricted to "everyone using this facility who is accompanied by a dog". And those skilled in the art will be able to think of several other semantic or pragmatic treatments, for instance involving the nature and scope of the deontic modal "must".

A second puzzle is why a difference in phrasal stress should apparently affect this ambiguity.

Jonathan Secora Pearl, "Eavesdropping with a Master: Leoš Janáček and the Music of Speech", Empirical Musicology Review 2006:

The composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) has been noted for his interest in speech melodies. Little discussion has focused however on the field methods that he used in gathering them, nor on the products themselves. Janáček spent more than three decades, transcribing thousands of what he termed nápěvky mluvy [tunelets of speech] in standard musical notation. The record that remains of these efforts is impressive both for its volume and its quality, as well as for its potential to reveal aspects of the perceptual overlap between music and language.

Here's an edited and typeset example of one of his "tunelets":

Because comments were turned off on "Root haughtiness", reader JCL added this comment to a different post:

I just wanted to propose that the unwritten restrictions on the use of -ass has NOTHING to do with the meaning of the adjective, and everything to do with meter. One-syllable words (/), trochees (/ -), and dactyls (/ – -) work, but everything else doesn't. For example: smart-ass, purple-ass, raggedy-ass.

Try it with words that aren't monosyllabic, trochees, or dactyls. Doesn't seem right, does it? Again, has nothing to do with the meaning of the words. What do you think of this hypothesis?

Kira Simon-Kennedy wrote to me from Beijing that she is chaperoning 30 French high school students on their first trip to China to learn Mandarin.

Yesterday afternoon, the French students were trying to decipher the following banner at a bus stop:  "没有共产党, 没有新中国."  Most of the students have already taken a couple years of lessons, so they could be classed as having reached intermediate level.  They got as far in their interpretation of the sign on the banner as "There is no collective __, there is no new China."  Not bad for intermediate level learners, but the banner remained a mystery to them, if only at the lexical level because they didn't know what 共产党 meant.  However, when Kira told the students that 共产党 meant Communist Party, they were all the more puzzled.  "Are they allowed to say that ('there is no Communist Party')?" one student asked.  "Isn't that really dangerous to deny the existence of the Party in public?"

The students thought that someone had the nerve to buy a public ad to tell the world:  "There is no Communist Party, there is no New China" — superficially that's what the sign on the banner seemed to be saying.  The close grammatical parallelism of the two clauses only made such an interpretation seem all the more certain.

In "Wow…?", 7/17/2011, I presented 10 isolated examples of "wow" or "oh wow" from published telephone conversations, and invited readers to judge the intensity and valence of each of the ten items (where "valence" is taken to mean the speaker's apparent negative or positive evaluation of the situation under discussion). There were 56 usable responses — I discarded another 5 or 6 because of  problems like 9 or 11 judgments instead of 10. I've done some simple analysis, described below.

The 56 sets of usable responses were well differentiated and fairly consistent: people evaluated these utterances in a lawful way. This kind of survey has promise as a source of input for efforts to learn the mapping between acoustic properties and human responses.

There's no obvious independent check on the "intensity" judgments, so the main question was how consistent they would be. In the case of the "valence" judgments, we can also look at the context to see how the speakers seems to be evaluating the state of affairs that they're responding to.

Robert Coren, in a comment on "X là là", 7/7/2011:

Surely the various shades of meaning of such exclamations are conveyed as much or more by tone of voice than by choice of vowel. I can certainly imagine saying "wow" to mean "That's really amazingly beautiful", and also saying "wow" to mean "Oh, that sounds really bad, I hope it gets better soon", and there being no doubt in my hearers' minds which one I meant.

Andy Coughlan, "First evidence that birds tweet using grammar", New Scientist 6/26/2011:

They may not have verbs, nouns or past participles, but birds challenge the notion that humans alone have evolved grammatical rules.

Bengal finches have their own versions of such rules – known as syntax – says Kentaro Abe of Kyoto University, Japan. "Songbirds have a spontaneous ability to process syntactic structures in their songs," he says.

To show a sense of syntax in the animals, Abe's team played jumbled "ungrammatical" remixes of finch songs to the birds and measured the response calls.

The basic article is Kentaro Abe & Dai Watanabe, "Songbirds possess the spontaneous ability to discriminate syntactic rules", Nature Neuroscience 6/26/2011. And like the coverage in New Scientist, it's both true and misleading.

After seven rounds of balloting, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee is Reince Priebus (Jeff Zeleny, "G.O.P. Elects a New Chairman as Steele Drops Out", NYT 1/14/2011). My reaction is a parochial one: as a linguist interested in prosody, I'm looking forward to Mr. Preibus's contributions to the study of English intonation.