Language Log

In the course of an enjoyable conversation over lunch yesterday, Michael Chorost asked whether disfluency is contagious, in the sense (for example) that talking with someone who uses "uh" a lot would tend to lead you to behave similarly.  This seems plausible, since such effects can be found in most other variable aspects of speech and language use, so I promised to check — with a warning that causation is especially difficult to infer from correlation in such cases.

According to Jennifer Viegas, "New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered", Discovery News, 3/31/2010:

Once thought to be rock art, carved depictions of soldiers, horses and other figures are in fact part of a written language dating back to the Iron Age.

The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.

The "new research" is described in Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan, and Pauline Ziman, "Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy", Proceedings of the Royal Society A, in press.

I'm spending this week at IEEE ICASSP 2010 in Dallas.  ICASSP stands for "International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing", and it's one of those enormous meetings with a couple of thousand attendees. This one has more than 120 sessions, with presentations on topics ranging from "Pareto-Optimal Solutions of Nash Bargaining Resource Allocation Games with Spectral Mask and Total Power Constraints" to "Matching Canvas Weave Patterns from Processing X-Ray Images of Master Paintings".

[What follows is a guest post from Robin Cooper, Professor of Computational Linguistics, Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, and Director of the Graduate School of Language Technology, University of Gothenburg. He reports on the ill-considered and appallingly executed destruction of the Computational Linguistics group at King's College London. — David Beaver]

The crisis at King's College, London and in particular the targeting for redundancy of its computational linguists and logicians has stirred significant international protest (see http://sites.google.com/site/kclgllcmeltdown/). Many hundreds of highly distinguished scholars from around the world have organized letters of protest querying the rationale behind these moves, which have happened at the same time as the College invested more than £20 million in acquiring Somerset House, a prime piece of central London real estate. Moreover, in contrast to universities that have undergone similar budgetary pressures in the US (e.g. in the UC system where senior faculty have been asked to take pay cuts in order to preserve jobs), at KCL moves towards firing permanent staff has been the first resort.

Via BoingBoing and many LL readers:

Suppose you had 100 digital recorders and 800 small languages, all in a country the size of California, but in one of the remotest parts of the planet.  What would you do?  What would it take to identify and train a small army of language workers?  How could the recordings they collect be accessible to people who don't speak the language?  My answer to this question is linked below – but spend a moment thinking how you might do this before looking.  One inspiration for this work was Mark Liberman's talk The problems of scale in language documentation at the Texas Linguistics Society meeting in 2006, in a workshop on Computational Linguistics for Less-Studied Languages.  Another inspiration was observing the enthusiasm of the remaining speakers of the Usarufa language to maintain their language (see this earlier post).  About 9 months ago, I decided to ask Olympus if they would give me 100 of their latest model digital voice recorders.  They did, and the BOLD:PNG Project starts next week.  Please sign the guestbook on that site, or post a comment here, if you'd like to encourage the speakers of these languages who are getting involved in this new project.

[What follows is a guest post reporting on a very disturbing situation at King's College London involving the sacking of senior computational linguists and others in a secretly planned, tragically stupid, and farcically implemented mass-purge. The author of the post is currently employed at KCL, and for obvious reasons must remain anonymous here.

Although it is clear that KCL is suffering from severe budgetary problems, the administration has reacted to the problems inappropriately and unconscionably: the administration is sacking some of KCL's most successful, academically productive and influential scholars, showing arbitrariness and short-sightedness in its decision making, and acting with extreme callousness in the manner by which the decisions have been imposed on the victims.

For those out of the field, I would note that I and other Language Loggers are intimately acquainted with the work of those under fire at KCL. It is among the most important work in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and computational linguistics, presenting ideas that many of us cite regularly and have absorbed into our own work, and which nobody in the field can ignore. – David Beaver]

Philosophers have been aghast at recent developments at King's College, London
where three senior philosophers, Prof Shalom Lappin, Dr Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Prof Charles Travis, have been targetted for redundancy as part of a restructuring plan for the KCL School of Arts and Humanities. The reason for targetting Lappin and Meyer-Viol has been explained to be that KCL is `disinvesting' from Computational Linguistics. One of the many puzzling aspects of this supposed explanation for targetting Lappin and Meyer-Viol is that there is no computational linguistics unit in Philosophy to disinvest from. (For detailed coverage see the Leiter Report here, here, and here, and these letters protesting the actions taken in the humanities.)

Posting on behalf of Phil Resnik:

This post brings together a bunch of news about language-related efforts to help out in Haiti:

Following up on "The order of ancestors" (12/24/2009) and "Sexual orders" (12/27/2009), I need to note one other important recent paper: Sarah Benor and Roger Levy, "The Chicken or the Egg? A Probabilistic Analysis of English Binomials", Language 82(2): 233-278, 2006. And several readers have pointed me to an older tradition of corpus linguistics that comes to a different set of conclusions about binomial ordering: Mishnah Keritot 6:9, etc.

In the comments on "The order of ancestors" (12/24/2009), there was some discussion about the possible role of gender bias in determining the preference for orders like "mothers and fathers" over "fathers and mothers".  This discussion faced a basic empirical problem: there were more plausibly-relevant principles (a long list of apparent semantic and phonological preferences) than there were facts to explain.

In this post, I'll review in more depth the evidence about the preferred orders of English binomial expressions for gendered categories of humans. This review will leave us in the same logical impasse.  Then I'll tell you about the clever solution found by Saundra Wright, Jennifer Hay and Tessa Bent in their paper "Ladies first? Phonology, frequency, and the naming conspiracy", Linguistics 43(3): 531–561, 2005.

Chris is puzzled by these Google counts, for famous quotations with and without quotation marks flanking the search string:

Gone With The Wind
about 797,000 for "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"
about 163,000 for Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!

Taxi Driver
about 17,500,000 for "You talkin' to me?"
about 7,450,000 for You talkin' to me?

As he explains: " I discovered something weird. In some cases, the more restrictive, double-quoted query returned more hits that the unquoted query. A lot more. "

One of the items featured in the New York Times Magazine's "Ninth Annual Year in Ideas", under the heading "Literary Alzheimer's", is a summary of Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, "Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie’s Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia: A Case Study", presented at the 19th Annual Rotman Research Institute Conference, Cognitive Aging: Research and Practice, 8–10 March 2009, Toronto.

Andrew Gelman is justifiably impressed by Laura Wattenberg's ruminations on rhyme (warning: the second link triggers one of those insufferable ads that starts playing loud sounds as soon as the page comes up, so mute your audio before clicking).  Ms. Wattenberg without the musical background:

Here's a little pet peeve of mine: nothing rhymes with orange. You've heard that before, right? Orange is famous for its rhymelessness. There's even a comic strip called "Rhymes with Orange." Fine then, let me ask you something. What the heck rhymes with purple?

If you stop and think about it, you'll find that English is jam-packed with rhymeless common words. What rhymes with empty, or olive, or silver, or circle? You can even find plenty of one-syllable words like wolf, bulb, and beige. Yet orange somehow became notorious for its rhymelessness, with the curious result that people now assume its status is unique.

Andrew wrote to ask about this, and so I did a bit of looking around for information about the statistics of rhyme.