Language Log

[This is a guest post by David Moser]

I took a group of my students, who are studying the Chinese medical system, to a yǎngshēngguǎn 养生馆 [VHM: "health center / club" — centered on TCM = Traditional Chinese Medicine], which are very common in Beijing.  I wanted them to see and experience firsthand the kinds of informal "well being" treatments that the lǎobǎixìng 老百姓 ("common people") indulge in every day, such as foot massage, cupping (báguàn 拔罐), medicinal foot baths, moxibustion, etc.

At a Semantics Workshop in the Rutgers Philosophy Department last weekend, my job was to comment on an excellent paper by Alex Lascarides & Julian Schlöder, "Understanding Focus: Tune, Placement, and Coherence". Here's the opening section of my presentation:

We modulate our linguistic performances in many ways, expressing our state of mind and our attitudes towards the interaction and towards the content of the message.

These modulations include officially phonologized aspects of prosody, like phonological phrasing, pitch accents, and junctural tones.

But they also include local and global modulations of other aspects of pitch, of speaking rate, of voice quality, of gesture, posture, gaze, etc. …and in text, there's layout and typography.

Scholars have recognized for at least a century that English intonation includes elements that are tropic to stress (“pitch accents”), and elements that are tropic to boundaries (“”boundary tones”). Current theory quantizes and phonologizes these elements in a particular way, turning them into tonal symbols that are integrated into phonological representations. There are also obviously many other communicatively-relevant aspects of prosody, which are treated as paralinguistic modulation, or ignored.

But posture, gesture, gaze, etc. include elements that are tropic to stress and elements that are tropic to boundaries. These are not generally quantized or phonologized in current linguistic theory.

Are these the right choices?

Robin Andrews, "Female Dragonflies Fake Their Deaths To Avoid Annoying Males", IFL Science 4/28/2017:

So, you’re in a bar, or on a bus, or grabbing a coffee, something like that – and that guy that kept grinning at you like a deranged werewolf decides to saunter on over, say hello, and strike up a highly unwanted flirtatious conversation. No matter how many hints you drop, he persists in trying to win you over – so what do you do?

Well, you could always take a cue from female dragonflies, who have come up with a rather effective way off putting off overly aggressive male suitors. When push comes to shove, they plummet to the ground, spasm around a bit, then play dead.

Writing in the journal Ecology, Rassim Khelifa – an entomologist from the University of Zurich with a penchant for the hovering critters – describes this as an “extreme sexual conflict resolution,” which we suppose is fair enough. Desperate times call for desperate measures, though.

This video was passed on by Tim Leonard, who remarks, "real-time video translation at its best":