Language Log

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.

A New York Times Room for Debate piece on "Killing Pythons, and Regulating Them" (3/5/2010) supplies another piece of anecdata for my on-going quest to document the North American varieties of uptalk. This one is from the sound track of a YouTube video about a python wrangler in central Florida.

I'm still noodling over Grant Barrett's  "On Language" column in the New York Times the week before last, which tracked the recurring claim that cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in English. It was a model of dogged word-sleuthing, which took us from George Jean Nathan to Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer and Donnie Darko (winnowed down, Grant said on the ADS list, from more than 80 citations for the story he collected).  But the very breadth of the material raised questions that couldn't be addressed in that forum. What accounts for the enduring appeal of this claim in English linguistic folklore? And more specifically: is there a reason why everybody settles on cellar door in particular? I think there is, ultimately. Are you sitting comfortably?

Commenting on "Three-syllable Mom" (12/28/2009), Brooke observes that

You can hear a genuine three-syllable "Mom" in the opening title sequence of the kids' television show, "Phineas and Ferb." The character Candace says,

"Mmm-MO-om, Phineas and Ferb are making a title sequence!"

The pitch matches the stress, low-high-low. The first syllable is brief but clearly discernible. I suppose one could argue that it's not a true syllable, since it lacks a vowel, but the word is certainly three distinct beats.

In today's newspapers and magazines:

"Newborns cry in their native language".
"Babies cry with an accent within the first week of life".
"Babies cry wiith the same 'prosody' or melody used in their native language by the second day of life".
"Newborn babies mimic the intonation of their native tongue when they cry".
"French babies cry in French, German babies cry in German and, no doubt, the wail of an English infant betrays the distinct tones of a soon-to-be English speaker".

The science behind these statements is in a paper released yesterday: Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke, "Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language", Current Biology, in press. Does it support these journalistic generalizations? Before reading the paper, I give ten-to-one odds against, on the general principle that journalistic statements involving generic plurals are almost never true. Mesdames et messieurs, faites vos jeux. Let's spin the wheel.

A few days ago, Kurt Andersen interviewed the novelist Richard Powers on Studio360. You can listen to the whole nine-minute interview here.

In the middle of the interview, Powers breaks into a sequence of declarative phrases with final rising pitch — what's sometimes called "uptalk". Before and after this sequence, which sets the stage for an account of his decision to become a writer, he consistently uses falling patterns. It seems clear that he means the rising contours to have a rhetorical effect. But it's equally clear that the intended effect is not to signal insecurity or to call into question his commitment to the truth of what he's saying. So as part of my on-going campaign to document uptalk — especially non-stereotypical examples — here's a description.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the off-beat placement of song syllables (and other other notes) in popular music of the past century. This can be seen as the displacement of events from an underlyingly regular meter, but often it can also be seen as a basic metrical pattern in which events don't fall at evenly-spaced time intervals  ("Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?", 11/26/2007).  The example that I looked at was a maximally simple one — the 3+3+2=4+4 "habanera" rhythm that rocked America in the late 19th century.

Today's post is about some rhythms that arrange events in a recurring cycle of 12 time-units. And although I'll start with another Afro-Cuban pattern, the Bembé, today's analysis will look at connections in renaissance Italy and ancient Rome, rather than in 20th-century America. (Attention conservation notice: unless you're interested in geeking out on a detailed analysis of metrical patterns, you'll probably want to skip onwards to some of our other fine posts…)

In earlier posts on the final-rising intonation patterns known as "uptalk", I've commented that "there are many conflicting assertions about its phonetic shape as well as its social distribution and its contextual function, but surprisingly few published examples that we can use to evaluate these claims", at least with respect to the North American version. So as I notice notice relevant examples in publications like archived radio shows, I've been documenting them here.

A couple of other examples turned up yesterday, in a "Radio Gift" segment on NPR's Day to Day program: "Dr. Boots Tries A No-Insurance Model", about Elizabeth Crowley, a doctor in New Jersey who decided to stop taking health insurance payments. (There's more background here, and the featured doctor also has a blog that's well worth reading.)

Yesterday, in answering a question from a reader, I glanced over the section on intonation in the 1877 edition of Henry Sweet's "A Handbook of Phonetics". I found what I was looking for, namely the section where Sweet distinguishes three "primary 'forms' or 'inflections' of tones" in the intonation of English — level, rising, and falling — and the "compound tones" such as "compound rising" (= fall+rise) and "compound falling" (= rise+fall).

But next came something surprising:

280.  The use of tone varies greatly in different languages. In English the tones express various logical and emotional modifications, such as surprise, uncertainty, &c. In some languages there is a tendency to employ one predominant tone without much regard to its meaning. Thus in Scotch the rising tone is often employed monotonously, not only in questions but also in answers and statements of facts. In Glasgow Scotch the falling tone predominates. In American English the compound rise is the characteristic tone. [emphasis added]

A reader from France, SW, wrote to ask some questions about English intonation:

It is with great interest that I discovered your posts on ‘uptalk’ on Language Log, in which you briefly retrace the history of the study of the phenomenon. In several of these posts, you highlight the fact that the association of uptalk with unassertiveness and tentativeness is unfounded, to say the least.

May I ask you if you thereby intend to correct the view propagated by somewhat simplistic newspaper articles, or if you are also disputing the views held by certain linguists?

(I would like to specify that my question is by no means meant to be polemical. I am currently doing research on language change and suprasegmental innovations in Leeds, where young people have recently been observed to use rising tones (UNB rises, not HRTs) at the end of declaratives, and I am trying to obtain information about the history of research on uptalk.)

I also noticed that you had entitled one of your posts ‘uptalk is not HRTs’. Could I ask you what difference you would then make between uptalk and HRTs (I had hitherto assumed that Alan Cruttenden and Robert Ladd established a clear difference between UNB rises on the one hand, and HRTs, *that is, uptalk*, on the other hand).

These questions and their answers are a bit more "inside baseball" than usual for Language Log — but perhaps some readers will be interested, and the rest of you are hereby warned to move along to another post.

On Saturday, I was at a workshop on "Brain Rhythms in Speech Perception and Production". One of the participants was Aniruddh Patel, author of Music, Language and the Brain. His presentation was "Rhythms in Speech and Music", and one of the papers that he discussed was John Iversen, Aniruddh Patel, and Kengo Ohgushi, "Perception of rhythmic grouping depends on auditory experience", JASA 123(4): 2263-2271, 2008.

Unfortunately, I had to leave that workshop early, in order to travel to Düsseldorf for the Berlin 6 Open Access conference, where I am now. As I was leaving, Aniruddh gave me a reprint of the Iversen et al. paper, and asked for comments. So I'll keep up my act as "the Madonna of linguists" (even though the reviews to date have been mixed), and offer my comments in the form of a blog post.

In my post "Uptalk anxiety", 9/7/2008, I tried to comfort an American parent who was worried about a daughter's use of rising pitch accents on statements. As part of the recommended cognitive therapy, I observed that there are regional varieties of English, known as "Urban North British", in which rising pitch accents on statements are more common than not.

But Bob Ladd, who ought to know, commented that "It's important not to confuse the rises in Belfast, Glasgow, etc. with uptalk. They're phonetically and functionally very different."

I responded that "There's no question at all that they're *functionally* different. In terms of sound, though, I think that the issue is less clear." I asked Bob whether he thinks that the pitch contours are systematically different, and in particular whether he could "tell the difference, on short phrases whose F0 and amplitude contour was used to modulate a non-speech oscillator, in the mode of the example e.g. here?"

Bob answered: "If you make some examples, we can do the experiment, but the short answer is that I think I could as long as there is a "tail", i.e. unstressed syllables after the nucleus (last main stress) – in the sound example I posted, there are two postnuclear syllables, -mond and mine. The main phonetic difference between classic North American / Antipodean uptalk and the "Urban North British" statement rises is that the latter rise at the nuclear syllable and then level out or trail off, whereas in uptalk the pitch just keeps on rising."

We're not ready to do the experiment yet, but I can offer some evidence-based suggestions about how it's likely to turn out.