Teaching Registers

23 June 2015

The Economist’s Prospero blog has a post on the necessity of teaching different registers of speech. It uses Portuguese as an example, which I can’t speak to, not knowing the language, but the fundamental point the article makes is a good one: “Instead of a rigid right-wrong approach, with the written form always being taught as right, it would be better to teach the idea of register: that certain forms are used in casual speech, other forms in formal speech, others still in writing.”

It’s a good point. Students are smart, and they instinctively know how to switch registers—they do it all the time in their own speech. The only thing that needs to be done is make them aware that they do it. It’s not a difficult concept.

Depicting World Languages

19 June 2015

Language visualization created by Alberto Lucas Lopéz for the South China Morning Post

A neat visualization of the twenty-three most popular languages, depicted proportionally by the number of speakers.

The graphic was created by Alberto Lucas Lopéz for the South China Morning Post.

Data like this is always a bit suspect, but this chart is based on the information at Ethnologue.com, which is generally pretty good. The biggest problem is that it represents only the top twenty-three languages, leaving out the other six thousand or so. It also only captures L1, or first-language users. The total number of English speakers, for example, is much larger. It also fails to capture dialectal differences; for example Chinese is not as unified as the chart makes it out to be. Still, it’s a useful visualization in many ways.

For me, the most surprising thing in the image is the realization that French has relatively few speakers. There are some 87 million additional L2 speakers, but that’s still not a lot compared to the other languages on the chart. I would have guessed that it would have been much higher. Still, in the rankings of all world languages, French is in the top one percent.

Book Review: The Language Myth

14 May 2015

Vyvyan Evans’s The Language Myth is something of a polemic. In the book Evans, a professor of linguistics at Bangor University in the UK, takes on the dominant paradigm of twentieth century linguistics, the universal grammar of Noam Chomsky, especially as popularized by Steven Pinker in books like The Language Instinct. Evans’s book is, to say the least, controversial, and I am not fully qualified to judge its merits. (But this being the internet, I’m going to anyway.)

The book is clearly written, engaging, and accessible to those without formal training in linguistics. So those readers of this website without such training should have no problem understanding Evans’s arguments. But the thing that kept nagging me as I read it was that the view presented is very one sided. I am not certain that Evans has accurately described universal grammar and the arguments behind it. It may be that at times Evans is tilting at something of a straw man or taking a since-retracted or out-of-context statement as definitive of the Chomskyan position. (This is just the impression I got from reading it; it may well be that Evans is spot on.)

Much of Evans’s argument hinges on the meaning of instinct and innate and the difficult task of separating that which is present at birth from that which is learned in infancy and earliest childhood. Unlike Chomsky, Evans argues that humans have a variety of cognitive faculties out of which language emerges. While language relies on specific functions of the brain, it is a social construct that is learned, and not a biological module in the brain that is unique to humans. He bases his conclusions on several sub-fields of linguistics. One is animal studies, the fact that all of the cognitive functions that enable language are found in various animal species—although not to the degree and refinement found in humans, and no known animal species has anything close to the sophistication of human language. Another is the study of how children acquire language—and it is this portion of Evans’s book that I find most compelling in refuting Chomskyan universal grammar. (Notably, it is the least polemical of the sections too.) Evans does a superb job of laying out what we know about language acquisition and how it flies in the face of Chomsky’s theory.

Evans also delves into neo-Whorfian theory and linguistic relativism. It is here that I dispute his argument somewhat, or rather a particular failure in his argument, and do so on firmer ground as I have more familiarity with this sub-field of linguistics. Evans does an excellent job of laying out the experimental evidence for neo-Whorfian relativism, such things as studies in color recognition and how it is effected by one’s native language. His description of the experiments is excellent, except in one respect. He omits any discussion of effect size. Many of the neo-Whorfian relativistic effects that have been shown to exist, while real and statistically significant, are very, very small. For example, a person with a name for a particular shade can recognize it faster than one without, but only about 1/100th of a second faster on average. It’s a measurable effect and relevant to our understanding of the basics of cognition, but it probably has no practical effect on how we live our lives. (Those in the medical field make the distinction between statistically significant and clinically significant, and perhaps linguists should take a tip from them.) To be fair, Evans does not state that there is much of a practical effect, but given how the Whorfian hypothesis has been misconstrued in the popular imagination and the mainstream press, leaving out discussion of effect size is a significant omission.

For those interested in the intersection of language and cognition, Evan’s The Language Myth is something of a must-read. But it should be read with the understanding that it presents just one view in a complex argument.

Evans, Vyvyan. The Language Myth: Why Language is Not an Instinct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

A Tawdry Comic

1 May 2015

Dinosaur Comics is one of my favorites, often riffing on linguistic issues. Today we get a double bonus: etymology and Anglo-Saxon history.

Review: Curzan's The Secret Life of Words

23 April 2015

I’ve been a bit leery of The Great Courses , a line of products that offers downloadable lectures by university professors. The idea combines two things that I have problems with: the whole massive open online course (MOOC) idea and paying for internet content.

MOOCs, or at least the way they’ve been touted as the savior of higher education, are problematic for a lot of reasons, but none of them apply to The Great Courses. One thing that MOOCs are good for is offering course content to those who simply want to learn—an open university. As to the second, I listen to a lot of audio podcasts—when I’m walking the dog or riding the subway into work. And there’s a lot of great audio content that is free (that is offered at no charge by the creator; I’m not talking about pirated stuff), so paying for content seems wasteful. And to one living on a grad student’s stipend, free is important. But it’s not just a personal problem; The Great Courses offerings are expensive, often running $200 or more for a course. 

But when another linguistic podcast that I listen to—Slate’s Lexicon Valley—offered a deep discount on one particular course, I took the plunge, forked over the fifty bucks, and downloaded the course. The course is The Secret Life of Words, by Anne Curzan, a professor of English at the University of Michigan.  I know Curzan by reputation and the course content was right up my alley, so I figured that it couldn’t been too disappointing.

I was not wrong. Curzan’s scholarship is excellent, as I expected. (Actually, I didn’t find a single statement in all her lectures that I would quibble over; that’s a rare feat, as there is almost always some minor fact or opinion that I can disagree with.) Her delivery is also engaging, clearly presenting and explicating complex linguistic concepts in plain language. The focus of the course is the English lexicon and where words come from, although Curzan does delve into other aspects of linguistics as the need arises to explain lexical history. The lectures run the gamut from talking about Old English to modern sports slang. Lecture titles include:

• Opening the Early English Word-Hoard

• Chutzpah to Pajamas—Word Borrowings

• The Tough Stuff of English Spelling

• I’m Good ... Or Am I Well?

• Wicked Cool—The Irreverence of Slang

• Firefighters and Freshpersons

• #$@%!—Forbidden Words

The course consists of thirty-six half-hour lectures. It’s available in both video and audio-only formats. I purchased the audio-only version, so I can’t say whether or not the video version is worth the extra money, but the course is completely comprehensible in audio-only, and at no point did I feel that I was missing content.

Now I’m still taken aback by the course’s list price of US$199.95 for the audio download ($374.95 for the DVD version). That’s a lot of money. But The Great Courses frequently offers sales and discounts through various outlets, so if you bide your time and watch for special offers, you can get the course for a lot less.

And right now there is a sale on all the language and literature courses, including this one. Until 14 May 2015 you can get audio download of The Secret Life of Words for $49.95.

If you’re reading this website, chances are you’re interested in the English lexicon and its history. That means this course is probably of interest, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.