Language Log

I've spent the past couple of days at GURT 2012, and one of the interesting talks that I've heard was Julian Brooke and Sali Tagliamonte, "Hunting the linguistic variable: using computational techniques for data exploration and analysis". Their abstract (all that's available of the work so far) explains that:

The selection of an appropriate linguistic variable is typically the first step of a variationist analysis whose ultimate goal is to identify and explain social patterns. In this work, we invert the usual approach, starting with the sociolinguistic metadata associated with a large scale socially stratified corpus, and then testing the utility of computational tools for finding good variables to study. In particular, we use the 'information gain' metric included in data mining software to automatically filter a huge set of potential variables, and then apply our own corpus reader software to facilitate further human inspection. Finally, we subject a small set of particularly interesting features to a more traditional variationist analysis.

This type of data-mining for interesting patterns is likely to become a trend in sociolinguistics, as it is in other areas of the social and behavioral sciences, and so it's worth giving some thought to potential problems as well as opportunities.

Keith Chen's recent proposal that the grammar of tense marking in a language has a causal effect on future-oriented financial and health behaviors is too intriguing to resist talking about. In fact, it reminds me of the words of a prominent linguist who once announced during his talk: "The explanation in question is almost certain to be false. However, if it were true, it would be incredibly interesting, so we have no choice but to explore it."

I'm not sure that this is the best argument for, say, how research funding should be allocated. At least, I've never had the guts to put that in a grant proposal. But if Language Log isn't the place to explore almost-certainly-false-but-incredibly-interesting-if-true ideas, then I don't know what is.

For a recent story on the arrest of Kim Dotcom, The World's Lisa Mullins turned to Georgina Ball from Radio New Zealand ("Cyber Tycoon Wanted for Internet Piracy Arrested in New Zealand", 1/26/2012). One of the things Ms. Ball says is this:

they're worried he'll flee to Germany which is where he's from
which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

Ed McBain, Long Time No See, 1977 (the 32nd of the 87th Precinct novels):

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “there are some questions we’d like to ask about your son and daughter-in-law.”

“Yes, certainly,” she said. “I’ll try to assist you as best I can.”

She was adopting the kind of formal speech many blacks used with whites, especially when the whites were in a position of authority. […]

“Mrs. Harris,” Carella said, “did your son and daughter-in-law have many friends?”

“Some, I believe.” Still the phony speech. Carella guessed she would use the word “quite” within the next several sentences. “Quite” was a sure indication that someone was using language he or she did not ordinarily use.

[This is a guest post by Bob Ladd.]

Following the wreck of the Costa Concordia last weekend (one Italian comic suggested it should be renamed Costa Codardia, where codardia means "cowardice"), I've been temporarily taken on as a correspondent by Language Log's Italian desk in order to report on a few linguistic aspects of the already notorious telephone call between the Coast Guard captain De Falco and the ship's much criticized captain Schettino.

To answer the many critics of his "whites have become black" diatribe, the Tudor historian and obnoxious TV personality David Starkey published an article in The Telegraph on August 19 defending his stance on the way Jamaican linguistic patterns are allegedly implicated in the cause of the English riots. The linguistically relevant point is that he has now shifted his reference away from "Jamaican patois", which is a synonym for Jamaican Creole, Ethnologue code JAM, henceforth JC (see my article in Times Higher Education on this). He now cites a "mixed race" critic of "ghetto grammar" to back up his condemnation:

Lindsay Johns, the Oxford-educated mixed-race writer who mentors young people in Peckham, argues passionately against "this insulting and demeaning acceptance" of a fake Jamaican — or "Jafaican" — patois. "Language is power", Johns writes, and to use "ghetto grammar" renders the young powerless.

The big deal in a new paper "Motivating voter turnout by invoking the self" (see also the official PNAS site, or e.g. this Discover magazine article "The power of nouns….") is that people can be manipulated into voting simply by clever use of nouns instead of verbs in a questionnaire. In each of several studies, potential voters were split into two groups and given (amongst other questions which didn't vary by group) one of two questions to answer:

Group 1 question: How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?

Group 2 question: How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?

Turned out that Group 1 turned out. Really. In one of the studies an amazing 95.5% of them actually turned out to vote, whereas only 81.8% of Group 2 voted. That's obviously a huge effect on voting behavior. And it appears to be caused by the use of a construction with the nominal "voter" instead of the verb "vote".

It has been over fifty years since Roger Brown and Albert Gilman published their classic article "The pronouns of power and solidarity" (American Anthropologist 4/6:24-39, 1960), analyzing what they called the T/V distinction. The letters refer not to a device on which one views reality shows, NOVA, soap operas, etc., but to the familiar (T for Latin or French tu) vs. formal (V for Latin vos/French vous) pronouns used to address someone. To oversimplify somewhat, reciprocal T expresses solidarity, and reciprocal V may also do so; non-reciprocal usage — using V to someone with superior status and receiving T from that person, or vice versa to someone of inferior status — expresses what Brown & Gilman called the power semantic. English, of course, can't express this difference with pronouns, because our only second person pronoun in general usage is you. But English does have address forms that capture the basic social distinction: reciprocal first-name (or sometimes last-name) usage for the solidarity semantic, non-reciprocal first-name vs. title plus last name for the power semantic. So, for instance, my formidable sixth-grade music teacher called me Sally, and I called her Miss Boe. Anything else would have been unthinkable.

All this is very old news. But I just ran across an interesting example in a terrific book I've been reading — David Halberstam's last book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.

Bill Poser's post on the English onset of (the word) tsunami provoked 99 comments so far, many of them of the form "I'm from X and I say Y". One of the things that we've learned in the past 50 years is that the "I say Y" part of such statements is almost always false.

One of the things that I learned during my recent short stay in Hong Kong is that there are some especially interesting ways of mixing English and Cantonese, including putting Cantonese in the middle of English words. One example (due to Bill Wang via Tan Lee):

so [mat1 je5] ry [aa3]
so 乜野 ry 啊
Why say sorry ? [Usually in an angry and unpleasant mood]

Recent mixtures of English into everyday use in other languages evoke mixed reactions, from amusement through annoyance to alarm.  It's important to recognize that this sort of thing has been going on for a long time — probably just as about as long as there have been languages to mix. And it's likely that reactions towards the negative end of the spectrum have also been around for many thousands of years.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few older examples. But I'll start with a relatively recent instance: the role of French in the speech of educated Russians of the 18th and 19th centuries.

John McWhorter on Talk of the Nation, "DEA Call For Ebonics Experts Smart Move", 9/6/2010. (Download mp3 here.)

In the July 12 & 19 issue of The New Yorker, there’s a nice little piece by Ben McGrath called “Spy vs. Spy: Say What?” that starts out, “Count linguists and phonologists among those bewildered by last week’s Russian spying scandal, in which the F.B.I. arrested a network of presumed Muscovite spooks who appeared to be living ordinary American lives, gardening and Facebooking and selling real estate under assumed identities.” (Never mind the problematic presupposition signaled by the conjunction ‘linguists and phonologists’.) Only an abstract of the article is in the accessible online issue, here. For the full article you need hard copy or a subscription to the digital online version.

The linguistic issue is that one of the spies explained her accent by saying she was Belgian, and another by declaring herself to be Québécois. Maria Gouskova, a UMass Ph.D. now an assistant professor at NYU and a specialist in Russian phonology, gets extensively quoted and does the profession proud, including showing that linguists and phonologists can have a sense of humor; and Ben McGrath seems to have done a fine job of writing it up, also with good quotes from Stephanie Harves and Joshua Fishman.