Language Log

The link was sent in by Andy Hollandbeck with the comment "I sometimes get the idea that at least one of the SNL writers is a regular Language Log reader".

From Leah Garchik's May 12 column in the SF Chronicle:

American poet Robert Bly, who will be at a Marin Poetry Festival reading at Dominican University in San Rafael on Sunday, told Sedge Thomson on "West Coast Live" last week that there's a reason Irish poetry is particularly melodic. "The Irish have time for long vowel sounds – unlike the English, who have too much to do. All those colonies are a lot of trouble."

[Tip of the hat to John V. Burke]

In a recent post ("Creole birdsong?", 5/9/2008), I mentioned Derek Bickerton's "language bioprogram hypothesis". Derek responded with a long comment. Since I responded to his comment with another post ("A multi-generational bioprogram? Derek Bickerton objects", 5/10/2008), I invited him to respond in kind. The guest post below is the result.

During a recent meeting with a grad student about research, the student produced if whether or not at the beginning of a subordinate clause where either if or whether or not (but not the two together) would have been appropriate. I  didn't catch the preceding context in detail, but I did notice the expression, and afterwards I googled on it.

And, of course, pulled up quite a few (legitimate-looking) examples. I have an idea about why people might have hit on this doubly-marked subordination (which I don't recall having come across before, and which seems to have escaped the notice of usage complainers; if it came by them, they probably just thought it was a slip of the tongue).

Truly, this is the golden age of linguistic blogging. The past week has seen three incredible breakthroughs in the area of typology, all based on discoveries announced in weblog posts.

A recent Associated Press wire story about the declining stock market contained an optimistic note from Phil Orlando, chief equity market strategist at Federated Investors. Orlando says the market is in decent shape, with two exceptions:

"Our view has been that the market, generally speaking, is in pretty good shape with the exception of the financial service companies and the consumer dictionary companies," he said.

The consumer dictionary companies? Are Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, et al. in trouble? Will they be needing a massive bailout from the Federal Reserve? Our lexicographical colleagues need not worry, since the AP article appears to be reflecting a different kind of dictionary trouble: the dreaded Cupertino effect.

From the annals of incorrection: cases where, because of some structural similarity between constructions C1 and C2, some people see C1 (incorrectly) as an instance of C2, where C2 is believed (incorrectly) to be non-standard (or defective in some other way), so that these people avoid C2 and replace it by something else. The proscription against C2 has then CONTAMINATED the innocent C1. On to cases.

In 1880, not long after the invention of the telephone, Mark Twain noted how weird a conversation is when you erase one of the participants ("That queerest of all queer things in the world", 3/25/2004):

I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise or sorrow or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.

Now Dan Walsh, an "an Irish musician, artist, nerd and businessman" who blogs under the name of Travors, has applied this technique to a comic strip: Garfield minus Garfield.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Yesterday, I described Olga Feher's demonstration that species-typical songs emerge, over several generations, in an isolated colony of zebra finches founded by birds raised in isolation ("Creole birdsong", 5/9/1008). I compared this pattern to Derek Bickerton's "bioprogram" hypothesis, first put forward in his 1981 book Roots of Language, and discussed again in his 2008 book Bastard Tongues ("A Trail-Blazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages"). As the Wikipedia article on the "language bioprogram hypothesis" explains, Derek's idea is that

when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists solely of a highly unstructured pidgin[,] these children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin, which characteristically has high syntactic variability, into a language with a highly structured grammar.

I also mentioned some of the subsequent debate over the bioprogram theory of creolization, quoting from an encyclopedia article by John Rickford and Barbara Grimes. Some of this debate has focused on whether the process of regularization in creole languages is complete in the first generation of native learners, or takes several generations. I observed that Bickerton's general idea ought to be consistent with a multi-generational emergence of a cognitive phenotype, where the species-typical pattern results from the accumulation of learning biases over several iterations.

However, some of Bickerton's critics have seen multi-generational creolization as evidence against his hypothesis. And to my surprise, it seems that he agrees with them. In an interesting comment on my post, he wrote:

Mark, you say that "Where social learning is involved, perhaps it's normal for the phenotype to emerge over multiple generations." And you may well be right, since social learning has nothing to do with creolization. How can you "socially learn" something for which you have no model, which didn't exist until you made it?

It's often impossible to tell the difference between reduced him and reduced them. In particular, I can't tell whether John Edwards said "I just voted for him on Tuesday, so…" — meaning Barack Obama — or "I just voted for them on Tuesday, so…" — i.e. sex-neutral them, meaning either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, he's not saying which.

Mark Halperin can't tell either, but he asks the question ("Did Edwards Tip His Hand?", 5/9/2008). You should listen to the whole Q&A before you decide for yourself.

In London en route to give a talk at a conference in Spain, I took an evening off to give my excellent brother Richard (he has done me so many favors) a really good birthday present. Richard is a long-time fan of the Four Seasons, so it couldn't have been clearer what the birthday present should be: center front-row dress-circle seats for Jersey Boys at the Prince Edward Theatre in the West End. It's an extraordinary production, extremely fast-paced, highly entertaining, and musically authentic. Nearly all of the greatest of the Four Seasons' hits and Frankie Valli's solo songs are performed in the course of a high-speed presentation of the group's life story. It's a wonderful night out.

The linguistic relevance of this, you ask? Well, of course there are linguistic aspects. This is Language Log, not Frankie Valli Log. Two linguistic points occurred to me.

Yesterday, I spent a fascinating afternoon at Ofer Tchernichovski's lab at CCNY. And a couple of weeks ago, the Penn Linguistics Department colloquium featured Ofer talking about some of his lab's recent research, including this work: Olga Feher, Partha P. Mitra, and Ofer Tchernichovski, "Abnormal isolate birdsong evolves into normal song over a few generations".

Zebra finches are among the songbirds who learn their songs by imitating adults, just as human children learn their language by interaction with those who already know it. Male songbirds raised in isolation, without any conspecific adult models during the critical period for song learning, are handicapped for life: they develop only an ill-organized, infantile "subsong". From the example of abused or feral children like Genie, we know that something similar happens with human children.

In both cases, this raises a sort of chicken-and-egg question: if normal development requires an adult model, then which came first, the pupil or the tutor?

Yes, it's a three-comic morning.