When a friend recommended Cormac Mccarthy's 'All the pretty horses' (the first part of the border-trilogy) to me 12 years ago, I first wondered why I would ever want to read a book that promised to mostly involve cowboys and horses and a lot of clichés about the west. A short ways into the book I realized how wrong I was---not about what the books is about, it indeed does involve mostly cowboys and horses and contains lots of familiar clichés---but I was wrong to think that such superficialities might in any way affect the degree of how captivated I would be with this book. In the hands of this writer any cliché is immediately restored to something untainted and original. I don't know how he does it, but I've since read many of his books and I'm still on the hook, and also still at a loss to explain why. Or maybe I do know why. He's just a fantastic writer and story-teller. Who cares what about, and whether sunsets are ridden into or not? I'm not surprised McCarthy is rumored to be among he favorites for this year's Nobel prize which will be announced in a few hours.
But coming back to the clichés (this post will touch on prosody eventually...). One very noticeable trope that keeps coming up in All the pretty horses are animal emitted and other scene-setting sounds. There's coyotes yammering and yapping, horse whinnying, desert doves waking, and, yes, dogs are barking. Pointing out that barking dogs are a cliché is already a cliché itself, but this article , which I came across googleing around while writing this blog post, does a particularly good job at that, and also at providing ample evidence that dogs bark everywhere around us the moment we pick up a book. And they form such a natural and effective part of the narrative in All the pretty horses that one has to conclude that tropes cannot be branded as clichés by themselves and black-listed because of how they have come to be used previously---
how stale or original they seem all depends on how they are used in a particular case. Maybe [prescriptive rules on how to avoid clichés](http://www.ehow.com/how_5423914_avoid-clichs-writing.html) are at the level of content what prescriptive rules about grammar at the level of style: silly. And maybe using clichés is like splitting infinitives: At times awkward, but often appropriate and [sometimes necessary](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000901.html).
So what are scene-setting sounds? I mean sounds that are not really part of the plot, but are used to set the stage, they are part of the background. The border between sounds that are part of the plot and those that are just background is blurry of course, and it's often artificial to single out sounds from other scene-setting elements and descriptions of nature, but let's go with the prototype of the notorious barking dog and see what we find.
The first occurrence in _All the Pretty Horses_ is on page three:
_In the distance, a calf bawled._
The 2011 LSA Institute, at University of Colorado, Boulder, will take place July 7-August 2. The courses have now been posted. If you’re interested in prosody, you might want to check out this one:
Prosody in the Lab
Instructor(s): Michael Wagner
Description:
You will learn how to test hypotheses about speech prosody in the lab. The focus is on learning by doing: You will design and carry out your own experiments (alone or in groups), and will learn some basics about how to evaluate them. The class projects will revolve around prosody. Prosody forms part of phonology, but often encodes syntax (e.g., via prosodic phrasing) or semantics/pragmatics (e.g., focus and topic structure, pragmatics of intonational tunes). There will be a broad range of projects from different domains you can choose from–or advanced students may want to come up with one of their own. So rather than covering the topic in breadth, this class encourages you to look at a very tightly circumscribed question that can be experimentally answered, and learn about prosody in general by studying something very particular. The class will make use of an experimental software developed in our lab that makes it easy to collect production data and automatically annotate them, and can also run simple perception experiments.
Prerequisites:
The course will require some general computer savviness, but mostly it will require a lot of enthusiasm and ability to work with some independence (jointly with others) on a class project. Some background in quantitative methods would help but is not required.
Time: Thursday, Sep. 16, 2010 - 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Location: Leacock Building, Room 232, 855 Sherbrooke Street West
As a precondition for entering the human community, infants must efficiently and rapidly acquire the meanings of words Their first procedures for doing so rely heavily on noticing the contingencies between the occurrence of a sound (e.g. “shoe”) with something observed (say, a shoe) in the environment. Because these links between sound and interpretive cue are notoriously uncertain and sometimes misleading, the procedure has widely been conceived as an associative-statistical one in which the choice of meaning is determined across several examples by recovering the features that recur most systematically with the sound (cf., Hume, 1740). Recent experimental results appear to support this position (Yu & Smith, 2007, inter alia). But several commentators and experimenters have pointed to the sheer rate and relative errorlessness of word learning as favoring a more insightful, one-trial, learning procedure that has been called “fast mapping” (Carey, 1978). In this talk I will present new experiments in word learning that strongly support the latter view. Discussion turns on the reasons why – experiments aside – this must be true. Prominent among such reasons is the “poverty of the stimulus” problem that also motivates theorizing about language acquisition at levels below (phonetics) and above (syntactic) the word form.
Time: Friday, Sep. 17, 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM
Location: Education Building, Room 216, 3700 McTavish Street
The distribution of EPP effects in the world’s languages is famously uneven; we find them in languages like English and French, but they seem to be absent in languages like Spanish and Italian. The point of this talk will be to develop a theory to predict the distribution of EPP effects from independently observable properties of languages, having to do with verbal morphology and the placement of stress in the verb. The proposal is part of a research program that seeks to provide deeper explanations for syntactic phenomena by allowing the syntax to make more extensive reference to phonology than we are used to. Part of the goal of the talk will be to explore the consequences the proposal has for our understanding of the interface between syntax and phonology.
Next year’s glow in vienna will include a workshop on the phonological marking of focus and topic, organized by Edwin Williams. Note that this workshop has a separate submission site on easy chair.
Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2010
Meeting Description:
GLOW 34 will be hosted by the department of linguistics, University of
Vienna
Colloquium: April 28-30, 2011,
Workshops: April 27 2011, May 1, 2011
Colloquium Topic: How much syntax is there in grammar?
Subject areas: Phonology, Semantics, Morphology, Syntax, Pragmatics,
Psycholinguistics
In addition there will be three workshops:
Intervention Effects from a Semantic Perspective
April 27, 2011
Workshop on the Phonological Marking of Focus and Topic
April 27, 2011
Here’s the description of the workshop on focus and topic:
The workshop will take the semantic notions of topic and focus as given, and investigate the systems for phonologically marking them, especially concentrating on variation in how the marking is done across languages. For example, we have the shiftable pitch-accents of Germanic languages vs. the relatively fixed prosodic structures of Romance; on a broader scale, we have languages like Japanese that do not use pitch-accents to mark focus, but nevertheless mark focus phonologically, through phrasing and varying pitch range. The following empirical and analytic questions are put forward as central to the project of the workshop:
* Are there languages in which there is no prosodic reflex of contrastive focus or givenness?
* How do those languages which encode focus and givenness prosodically differ in the phonological and phonetic tools to mark these notions?
* Do phrasing and prominence go hand-in-hand, or are they two orthogonal dimensions that interact with focus and givenness marking independently?
* Which comes first, focus or prominence; that is, is the mapping accent-to-focus or focus-to-accent?
* Are differences in focus marking paralleled by differences in topic marking?
* How does the marking of contrastive or’‘corrective’’ focus/topic differ from neutral focus/topic across languages?
* How do phonological means of marking topic or focus interact with syntactic and morphological means?
Comparative studies are especially encouraged, as well as studies of systems different from the well-known ones.
The field of phonetics has experienced two revolutions in the last century: the advent of the sound spectrograph in the 1950s and the application of computers beginning in the 1970s. Today, advances in digital multimedia, networking and mass storage are promising a third revolution: a movement from the study of small, mostly artificial datasets to the analysis of published corpora of natural speech that are thousands of times larger.
To welcome and promote this revolution, we will organize a workshop on new tools and methods for Very-Large-Scale phonetics research, as part of a newly awarded NSF grant. The themes of the workshop include: integration of speech technology in phonetics studies; variation and invariance in large speech corpora; and revisiting classic phonetic and phonological problems from the perspective of corpus phonetics. A tutorial on forced alignment and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner will also be provided prior to the workshop.
Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Linguistics.
Important Dates
We are pleased to announce that the the ninth International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP’11) will be held in Montreal, Canada from June 20th to 23rd, 2011. ISSP’11 is the continuation of a series of seminars dating back to Grenoble (1988), Leeds (1990), Old Saybrook (1993), Autrans (1996), Kloster Seeon (2000), Sydney (2003), Ubatuba (2006), and Strasbourg (2008). Several aspects of speech production will be covered, such as phonology, phonetics, linguistics, mechanics, acoustics, physiology, motor control, neurosciences and computer science.
For this edition, a special session will be organized in honor of Dr. Joseph Perkell, for his contribution to the field.
THE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION IS NOVEMBER 15th, 2010. Technical details will be posted soon on the conference website (www.issp2011.uqam.ca).
Here’s an article by Guy Deutscher on language and how it influences thinking. Mercifully, Deutscher discusses this fascinating topic without trying to further inflate its public appeal by vague claims on how it all devalidates generative linguistics and most of all Chomsky (it sure sounds cool to argue against a big name, and why not an entire field?)–as Lera Boroditsky unfortunately did here. As if this research was only interesting if it also showed that someone else’s research is worthless. Daniel Harbour has some insightful comments on the latter article on his blog, and points out that it’s unclear just how this is supposed to invalidate the kinds of assumptions many generative linguists make these days. If you are (as most linguists) mostly interested in the nuts-and-bolts of how language works in all its beautiful intricacy it can be exasperating to watch how far the level of argumentation often drops when people start debating universal grammar (in my experience that tendency exists on both sides of the debate). A lot of linguistic research is interesting independent of whether one believes in universal grammar, and it seems to me that a lot of the work and the results don’t bear on this question at all, and don’t even rely on the assumptions that Daniel lists.
Besides, it’s much more fun (at least if you’re a linguist) to read about the exciting research on how cross-linguistic differences influence how we think that is conducted in Boroditsky’s lab and elsewhere without the unnecessary swipes. Another Daniel, Daniel Casasanto, a recent graduate from Boroditsky’s lab, wrote an interesting article a while ago on linguistic relativity and the debates it has generated, which does a nice job at clarifying what this renaissance in linguistic relativity research is about and what it is not about, aptly titled Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Whorf?
In case anyone is still worried that texting abbreviations are a sign that the English language is deteriorating they should have a look at the article in the Guardian a few days ago about an upcoming exhibition on language at the British Library in London, which provides evidence that these abbreviations are actually a time-honored tradition of playful language/orthography use. Among other things the exhibition revisits the history of language peevery, it seems, with such landmarks as Jonathan Swift’s A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. One of the many grievances Jonathan Swift had with his fellow English users was that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words. Swift would surely not have been amused by the poetic use of things like “I wrote 2U B4” in an 19th century poem the exhibition features. Anatol Stefanowitsch, whose blog post pointed me to this, dug up the complete poem referred to in the article, Essay to Miss Catharine Jay, as it was published in 1847. Some of the ‘emblems’ are not easy to resolve, have a look… The one that Anatol is wondering about in his post is ‘The girl without a parallel’ as a girl without a parallel pointed out to me.
Radiolab’s interesting current podcast is about language. Radiolab is a great radio show about science, and it differs from your typical media outlet on science in that its topics are often drawn from cognitive science. I can think of a bunch of questions relating to the strong claims made in the show about how relevant language is to perform various cognitive tasks, but the research the show reports on is fascinating. See also the additional video that comes with the podcast, also featured on the language log, including some nice footage of Taughannock Falls:
Something everyone seems to have intuitions about is: What types of rhyme sound good? What types of rhyme sound bad? One particular type of rhyme, called ‘identity rhyme’ (write/right, to bear, a bear), is licit in French but quite poor in English (So poor indeed that King James proscribed the use of identity rhymes in a treatise in 1584.) See an earlier post on the topic here.
We present evidence that this difference in rhyming between French (and other Romance languages) and English (and other Germanic languages) can be explained by a seemingly unrelated difference between them: English uses emphasis to foreground new and contrastive information and to background old and repeated information, much like one uses a highlighter to emphasize important information in a text. French (and other Romance languages) does not use acoustic prominence in this way, or at least does so to a much smaller degree and under a much narrower set of circumstances. An admittedly quirky but illustrative example: the name of the band AC/DC has less prominence on the two ‘C’s in English and other Germanic language, but not in French and other Romance languages. This difference becomes very salient in french-accented English and English-accented French, a fact one can experience every day in a bilingual city like Montreal. We argue that the mechanics of how this ‘highlighter’ works in English has the effect that identity rhymes sound odd.
[completely unrelated side note: i was wondering what the right agreement is in the sentence above, and ‘the mechanics of … has’ and ‘the mechanics of … have’ and i let the google vote. both seem to be equally used (same for is/are)]
Title and Abstract of the Paper:
Michael Wagner (McGill University) & Kate McCurdy (Harvard University)
Poetic Rhyme Reflects Cross-Linguistic Differences in Information Structure
Identity rhymes (to bear/a bear, right/write) are considered satisfactory and even artistic in French poetry but are considered unsatisfactory in English. This has been a consistent generalization over the course of centuries, a surprising fact given that other aspects of poetic form in French were happily applied in English. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that this difference is not merely one of poetic tradition, but is grounded in the distinct ways in which information structure affects prosody in the two languages. A study of rhyme usage in poetry and a perception experiment confirm that native speakers’ intuitions about rhyming in the two languages indeed differ, and a further perception experiment supports the hypothesis that this fact is due to a constraint on prosody that is active in English but not in French. The findings suggest that certain forms of artistic expression in poetry are influenced, and even constrained, by more general properties of a language.
