CamLangSci

This is a sign in the bike park at Cambridge Station. Now, this bike park is a great thing and a long time coming – it’s dry, lit and features plentiful CCTV. What’s more, parking your bike here is actively encouraged, to avoid clutter around the station. But then when you get in, you are confronted with this sign: any bikes parked here will be removed. What are you to do? (apart from feel a bit confused). It gets me every time, at least, but maybe you didn’t find it so confusing. The thing is, I think what is meant is ‘bikes left against this column will be removed’. It’s that little word ‘here’ that’s causing the bother. You see, on its own, how do we know whether it refers to the column, the level of the bike park, the whole bike park, the station vicinity, Cambridge, England, the earth… ? Its meaning is context-dependent – we know that it pertains to a particular locality, but the size of that locality varies depending what we’re talking about. The name for this kind of word is an indexical. Other examples are ‘there’, ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’ and pronouns like ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’. ‘There’ and ‘now’ are a bit like ‘here’, in that the scope of them can vary in size; ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ do refer to a particular day (usually – but can you think of exceptions?) but which day in question depends on when the speaker is speaking; and then for the pronouns it depends on who – or what – is being pointed to, for instance. These commonplace words are just one of many clues that point to how context-dependent language is: whenever we hear or read something, we can’t work out what the speaker means unless we take into account the context in which it was uttered – when, where, who, how. The amazing thing is that we usually manage to do this really quickly and subconsciously – so smoothly that we don’t even notice. We only do when we occasionally get it wrong – in the case of miscommunication – and we have to go back (in the case of reading) or ask for clarification (in the case of speaking) to get the speaker’s meaning. When was the last time that happened to you?

Since Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and subsequent election catapulted him to even greater levels of attention than he had previously enjoyed, many many people have come to notice something distinctive about his speaking style – and, as you might expect, linguists have not been exempt from this in the slightest.

A Google search for trump linguistics gives articles with comments on the President’s language style from half a dozen different linguists on the first page alone. The contributors to linguistics blog Language Log can’t get enough of Trump, as a search of the site reveals (not all of those posts are about Trump’s own language use, but many of them are). There’s even a book about how Trump talks –Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity  by Dr. Jennifer Sclafani, published in August 2017.

So, what’s so remarkable about the way Trump speaks? Well, you can go away and read about it yourself from the links above, but here are a few of the more interesting things. Sclafani notes how Trump tends to make use of a casual tone, with “simple vocabulary and grammar”. His speech is typified by asides and unexpected switches of topic: who knows what’s going on with the following non sequitur?

They’ve won five wars where the armies that went against them froze to death. It’s pretty amazing. So, we’re having a good time. The economy is doing great.

Trump likes repetition and hyperbolic vocabulary, as shown in one interview where he mentions in quick succession “great chemistry with all of the leaders”, “amazing relationships”, “great relationships”, “great chemistry”.  On a similar note, Kristen Kobes Du Mez notes Trump’s liking of “verbal intensifiers” like “very very”,  “many many” and “super-duper”; Eric Acton points to his use of superlative adjectives: “biggest”, “strongest”, “toughest”.

He sometimes addresses himself (“Thanks Donald!”). He says things like “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job” when talking about somebody who’s dead – you’d usually expect to hear ”somebody who did an amazing job”.  Compared to previous US Presidents, he talks much more about “America” but much less about “freedom”. And who could fail to notice his frequent catch phrases, like “fake news”, “crooked Hillary” and “Sad!”?

I could go on. It’s fascinating that there’s so much to say about the language of just one individual. It just goes to show how rich and abundant the data that linguistics is based on is – that even one person can spark whole books’ worth of research and more.

But of course it’s not only Trump who has a unique speaking style. In fact, the way everybody speaks is a little (or a lot) different from everybody else. That’s why you can identify a friend speaking down the telephone, or with your back turned to them, or why certain actors and other public figures are so associated with their voices (James Earl Jones, Morgan Freeman, the Queen, David Attenborough). It’s why the science of forensic linguistics is able to use linguistic clues to solve crimes – though it can’t (yet) boast of 100% accuracy. Linguists call the idiosyncratic way of speaking that each of us has our “idiolect”. In a way, everybody speaks a different language – differing in the words we know and use, the styles of speaking we prefer, the exact grammatical rules we employ, or the way our speech sounds due to subtle differences in the shape of our mouths.

All this goes to show just how wonderful and diverse language is. All of us have our own unique way of speaking, and so much can be said about the speech even of just one person. There is just so much to investigate for linguists, and for anybody interested in language.

If you have listened to Korean and thought there’s something odd about the pronunciation of the word-initial nasals /n m/, you’re not alone. In fact, you probably know more than the average native speaker about the peculiarity of Korean nasals! I bet that an absolute majority of Koreans are totally unaware of it, something which is so striking to many Korean learners.

So, yes, you were spot on when you thought you heard something like [dugu] or even [t(h)ugu] instead of /nugu/[1] ‘who’ (누구), and [bwʌrago], [p(h)wʌrago] instead of /mwʌrago/ ‘what?’ (뭐라고), while watching your favourite K-drama. In other words, nasals in Koreans lose nasality and sometimes even voicing in word-initial position. It’s only very recently that word-initial denasalisation became recognised by Korean phoneticians as a regular feature of spoken Korean and became a topic of systematic investigation (Yoshida 2008; Y-S Kim 2011).

Korean Denasalisation shows patterns associated with so-called domain-initial strengthening (Cho & Keating 2001). Domain-initial strengthening refers to the phenomenon in which domain-initial consonants are pronounced with longer, greater articulatory gestures. The domain here refers to any prosodic domain, which can be defined as the unit of speech larger than segments (vowels and consonants) such as syllable, phonological word (PW), accentual phrase (AP), intonational phrase (IP), and utterance. Domain-initial strengthening is found with different types of sounds in different languages including French, English, Estonian, Tamil, Taiwanese, Dutch, and Korean. For example, English /t/ and /h/ show a longer aspiration (the ‘h’ sound in e.g. ‘thick’, which creates a puff of air; this isn’t found in e.g. ‘stick’) and a larger glottal gesture in phrase-initial position than in phrase-medial position (Pierrehumbert & Talkin 1992).

Now, here’s why domain-initial strengthening is so cool. The effects of domain-initial strengthening are cumulative, so that the larger the prosodic domain of the initial segment, the greater the effects. Using domain-initial denasalisation as an example, IP (or large phrase, in plain English) -initial nasals are more denasalised than AP (a unit made up of one or two phonological words in Korean) –initial nasals, and AP-initial nasals are in turn more denasalised than PW-initial nasals, and so on. Let’s look at some examples:

1(a) /ob*a IP[mandu mʌgɯrʌga]/

‘Obba (what you call an older brother), are you going to eat dumplings?’

오빠, 만두 먹으러 가?

1(b) /ʌmma ob*a AP[mandu mʌgɯrʌga]/

‘Mom, is Obba going to eat dumplings?

엄마, 오빠 만두 먹으러 가?

1(c) /ʌmma ab*aga AP[ob*a pw[mandu]] mʌgɯrʌga]/

‘Mom, is Dad going to eat “Obba Dumpling” (product name)?

엄마, 아빠가 오빠 만두 먹으러 가?

All these sentences contain the word /mandu/ ‘dumpling’, with the word-initial /m/. The key difference is that the highest possible position of /m/ is the IP-initial position (though, of course, it is also syllable-initial, word-initial, and so on) in (a), AP-initial position in (b), and PW-initial position in (c). Because the effect of Korean denasalisation is cumulative, the extent of denasalisation is (a)>(b)>(c). I would be surprised if an English listener heard the /m/ in (c) as anything other than [m]. But the /m/ in (a) is likely to be completely denasalised and devoiced as [p], and may even be slightly aspirated [ph]!

As what’s described so far is a relatively new discovery, there is a lot to be known about domain-initial denasalisation in Korean and domain-initial strengthening in general. One of the most exciting questions to ask next is what role domain-initial strengthening plays in perception. Because we now know that the pronunciation of consonants is not invariant but shows fine-grained variation as a function of prosodic position, we can hypothesise that this information can be used by listeners as a cue to a prosodic boundary. Consider the following examples:

2(a) IP[While eating], IP[my dog, my cat and I watched the TV].

2(b) IP[While eating my dog], IP[my cat and I watched the TV].

I’m using English examples for a quick illustration, but similar examples can be found easily in Korean. For now, let’s assume that English has domain-initial denasalisation. We would then expect the /m/ in (a) to be denasalised to a greater extent than in (b), because it is in IP-initial position. Given the pattern, are listeners able to use denasalisation as a cue in speech perception to disambiguate these sentences, in addition to pitch and duration cues? This is exactly what I’m trying to find out during my fieldwork in Korea in the next two months, so we’ll see!

  [1] Slant brackets are for phonemes, the abstract mental representation of a segment in the speaker’s mind. If you like, this is what the speaker thinks they are saying. On the other hand, square brackets are for (allo)phones, the actual realisation of phonemes, which may be slightly different every time they are uttered and from what the speaker thinks they are pronouncing.

  References

Cho, T., & Keating, P. A. (2001). Articulatory and acoustic studies on domain-initial strengthening in Korean. Journal of Phonetics, 29(2), 155–190.

Kim, Y. S. (2011). An acoustic, aerodynamic and perceptual investigation of word-initial denasalization in Korean. University College London.

Pierrehumbert, J., & Talkin, D. (1992). Lenition of /h/ and glottal stop. Papers in Laboratory Phonology II: Gesture, Segment, Prosody, 90–117.

Yoshida, K. (2008). Phonetic implementation of Korean denasalization and its variation related to prosody. IULC Working Papers, 8(1).

Do the languages you speak affect your well-being? By which I don’t mean, does speaking language X make you happier, on average, than speaking language Y? Nor am I thinking of the body of evidence – somewhat controversial and definitely complex – that there is a bilingual advantage for particular cognitive functions. Rather, in a particular linguistic context, how do language choices – which languages you learn, which languages you lose – influence life satisfaction?

Take Johannes. His parents are German but he’s been in the UK since he was just a tot. He feels more British than German and doesn’t want to waste time at the weekend at the community language school, or even to talk to his parents in German. After all, they can speak English, so even when they try to talk to him in German, he answers back in English, which is the language he uses with most of his friends. It can cause quite a bit of friction at home, and it does make trips to his grandparents trickier, but that doesn’t happen so often. Or what about Amira: she’s happy speaking Turkish with family and friends, but hasn’t learnt to read or write the language. Now she’s growing up, that makes it harder to investigate her questions about identity herself. And there’s Sandra: she only learned English at home, but school Spanish, and now degree, has given her experiences and friendships across the world.

These examples are made up, but perhaps you can identify with one. The recent OECD Pisa report looked at well-being in young people across the world for the first time, and found that one of the main predictors was communication within the family: where parents spent time just talking with their child, he or she was over 60% more likely to report high levels of life satisfaction. Likewise, in UK The Good Childhood Report 2013 found that talking with parents about things that matter, as well as seeing friends and extended family, were positively associated with well-being. Good communication and the relationships that it builds, of course, involve language. What happens when members of a family – or community – can no longer talk to one another, or not fluently?

There is some evidence that maintaining a home language – like speaking German, Turkish, Arabic or any of the hundreds of languages spoken in UK – as well as learning the language of the community – in our case English – can be beneficial for well-being, precisely through this crucial link between quality of relationships and well-being.1 Annick De Houwer talks about ‘harmonious bilingualism’, where “on the whole children and their families do not experience any interpersonal problems because of the language contact situation, or have a clearly positive experience with bilingualism” (2013:170).2 Of course, the picture is going to be a complex one, with the social characteristics of the community, prestige of the languages, and many other factors playing a role. However, these are fascinating and necessary questions to ask, in our increasingly multilingual society – and ones which are only just beginning to see research to answer them. Members of the Cambridge Bilingualism Network are hoping to lift the lid on some of the issues, so watch this space for more thoughts on multilingualism and well-being in the coming months!

1. E.g,. Tannenbaum, M., & Berkovich, M. (2005). Family relations and language maintenance: Implications for language educational policies. Language Policy, 4(3), 287–309.

2. De Houwer, A. (2015). Harmonious bilingual development: Young families’ well-being in language contact situations. International Journal of Bilingualism, 19(2), 169–184.

Leaving my room in a rush one day, I walked straight into the wall opposite my door. It was a high-speed collision, the wall was a properly constructed one – not a paper thin one like the one separating me from my neighbour –, and the result could be described as full-on face-meet-wall contact. “Oh oopsy daisy!” I exclaimed, brushing off the blood gushing from my nose, patting some powder onto my increasingly blackening eye, and wondering how much reconstructive facial surgery would be necessary.

I lie. Hugh Grant may have gone for an ‘oopsy daisy’ in Notting Hill (for those who haven’t seen the British romcom classic, shame on you: he fails at his attempt to climb into a private garden over a spiked fence), but I had no Julia Roberts around to keep my language in check. Suffice to say that it was an expletive heavy incident for me, with said wall undergoing heavy verbal abuse – details of which would probably lead to this post being censored.

‘Oopsy daisy’ may be as iconic as the Travel Bookshop but not as effective as the good ol’ f-word in alleviating pain. Credit: Álvaro Millán.

But I feel justified in my expletive outburst given what swearing can tell us about language, culture, and society.

Back in 2009, scientists at Keele University discovered that swearing can in fact ease pain. They had participants (or ‘volunteers’ as they put it – I’d hope so!) submerge their hand in iced water, and repeat either swear words or words that could be used to describe a table (‘brown’ for instance). Interestingly, the participants were able to keep their hand in longer when they swore; their heart rate also accelerated, and their pain perception was reduced. I was basically just applying a verbal painkiller!

Just a few weeks ago, Keele University came back with more swearsome results: swearing also makes you stronger. This time the experiment was somewhat less painful, with volunteers hopping onto an exercise bike and performing a hand grip test. When swearing, the participants’ peak power rose by 24 watts in a 30 second cycling challenge, and there strength was boosted by the equivalent of 2.1kg in the grip test – not surprisingly, table-describing words didn’t do it for anyone.

Any guesses how much he swears? Credit: Helgi Halldórsson.

Swearing isn’t only about enhancing physical powers, though. It can also shed light on how emotionally connected we feel to a language. To throw some science at you, there is a phenomenon called reduced emotional resonance of language. It’s not uncommon for bilinguals to report that they ‘feel less’ in their second language. They may, for example, find discussing taboo or emotionally involved topics – love, sex, death, you know the drill – easier in their second language because they’re emotionally more distant from it. Swearing falls into this category, too: chances are that if a speaker is more profane in one of their languages, it won’t be their first one. Why and how exactly this works are still question to be answered – keep your eyes peeled for exciting results from Glasgow, though!

What exactly you say to swear once you’ve picked your language to do so varies from one language and culture to another. Universally speaking, though, items bad enough for swearing tend to involve forbidden desires, and have some societal power or control structure attached to them.

Genitalia, for example, is a cross-cultural favourite when comes to qualifying items for swearing vocabulary. Female anatomy often makes for more powerful swearing: some say this is because the male bits and pieces are key (no pun intended) to power in society, while female genitalia are to be reserved to a specific male, and hence more forbidden. In Rinconada Bikol in the Philippines, buray ni nanya ‘mother’s vagina’ is a common expression, while in Finnish vittu ‘vagina’ (not just your mother’s, any will do) is one of the crudest swearwords, coming in an array of noun, verb, and adjective uses. In Arabic, you can insult someone by calling them fatah ‘foreskin’. In Italian, you can always opt for che cazzo! (‘What the cock!’). You get the picture.

Eh calice! Credit: 4saintsepiscopalfoodpantry

Power structure also crops up in religious swearwords. In Quebec French, a lot of strong language favourites come from church objects rather than the classic continental merde: tabernacle (where communion wafers are stored) and calice (a chalice for wine) have taken on other uses than just the ones describing church objects, reflecting the strong prominence of the Catholic church until a few decades ago. Also in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish the likes of hell, the devil, and co. are a go-to solution when expressing negative emotion. Take Finnish perkele for example. Roll out that trilled r to release all your pent up anger, while referring to the pre-Christian thunder god.

Needless to say, the list goes on. Next time you feel like letting it all out, do it (but don’t say I told you to) and take a note of what comes out. Chances are it’ll reflect societal trends, psychological processes, and your language preferences. How f***ing awesome is that?

I love emojis. Who doesn’t? The LOL face [😂] (official name: “Face with Tears of Joy”) was chosen by Oxford Dictionaries as Word of the Year in 2015, and the recent popular SHRUGGING emoji [🤷] (according to Emojipedia) is just as expressive. Being called ‘word’ seems to suggest that emojis are part of a verbal language (and indeed there have been linguistic studies of them), though one can’t really tell which language they belong to. English? Japanese? Or some ‘universal language’?

Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2015: the LOL emoji [1]

Well, it may be too early to grant ‘language’ status to emojis, because, on the one hand, they can never be used as a first language (even if they had sounds), nor can human communication solely rely on emojis (this should be obvious, I’d hope). On the other hand, these cute little ideograms can fit into any language, as you can see below.

(1) a. [😋] Get list of all emojis to [✂️] and [📋]. (English) b. Les emojis de Samsung sont [🤢]. “The emojis of Samsung are ugly.” (French) c. Muchos éxitos chicas [👏][🎉]! “Many successes (i.e. good luck) girls!” (Spanish) d. Guten [🌇]! Montag ist doch ein schöner Tag [😴][😷]. “Good morning! Monday is a good day.” (German)

Such ubiquity implies that if an emoji can play a role in one language, it would have a role to play in every language. In other words, emojis probably are universal, but they do not form a complete language; what they realize are probably some universally available linguistic concepts or categories. Some of these categories are easier to translate back into verbal language, such as ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ in (1a) (Verb), ‘ugly’ (French moches) in (1b) (Adjective), and ‘morning’ (German Morgen) in (1d) (Noun). Others are less easy to translate. For example, the Clapping Hands plus Party Popper in (1c) intensify the preceding proposition (a wish), and the Sleeping Face plus Face with Medical Mask in (1d) depict the mood of the speaker (presumably ‘sleepy and sick’). But these meanings are ineffable in the corresponding verbal languages Spanish and German – at least not with equal-sized elements (e.g. 1 emoji = 1 word). The Face Savouring Delicious Food in (1a) is even more difficult to translate, for it is not even clear what its relationship with the English sentence is (perhaps it functions as a discourse marker like well).

If we want to incorporate these emojis into sentence structure, the translatable ones realize V, A, and N not so differently from their verbal counterparts. The ‘untranslatable’ ones, on the other hand, probably realize some functional constituent adding discourse meanings to propositions. Following the tradition of syntax, let’s call this unknown constituent EmojiP (=Emoji Phrase).

A syntactic tree for EmojiP

Now, there are two interesting observations. First, this EmojiP may be sentence-initial (1a) or sentence-final (1c,d), but it seldom shows up in the middle of a sentence. Since the quasi-well in (1a) is not necessarily part of the following sentence, we can boldly assume for now that EmojiP is always sentence-final, regardless of the general head direction of the language – both French and German actually have head-initial CP, as is shown in the emoji-free sentences below.

(2) a. J’ai dit [CP [C que] [TP j’aime les pommes]].  “I said that I like apples.” (French) b. Ich bin sicher, [CP [C dass] [TP ich meinen Reisepaß habe]]. “I’m sure that I have my passport.” (German)

Second, the EmojiP elements, namely the emojis (LOL), do not necessarily depend on verbal sentences; they may well appear as standalone utterances and be assigned whatever interpretation our imagination renders. For example, someone texted their mom the emoji string in (3), which got two different interpretations.

(3) 🍴🌙🍝 Intended version: I had spaghetti for dinner last night. Mom’s version: I had noodles and a croissant.

Such ambiguity is unlikely to arise in English (or any natural language), which can well distinguish last night (/læst naɪt/, Adverbial) and croissant (/krwɑːsɒŋ/, Noun) phonologically and categorially. Importantly, in English the time adverbial doesn’t come between the verb and its object, as in (4).

(4) *I had last night spaghetti.

In this sense, the mom’s understanding is more natural – she simply followed the VO word order of English. This said, the child’s choice of word order perhaps isn’t random either, because in the world of emojis the ‘preverbal’ constituent is by default interpreted as the agent subject. So, without additional disambiguating mechanisms, neither (5a) nor (5b) could easily result in the intended interpretation.

(5) a. 🍴🍝🌙 (same problem as (3)) b. 🌙🍴🍝 (by default “some moon-shaped agent ate noodles”)

The above two observations have two implications for the syntax of emojis. First, EmojiP is an exceptional constituent which needn’t obey the head-initial phrase-structure parameter. In other words, it’s probably neither a head nor a specifier. Second, the emoji ideograms are only associated with minimal (and maybe unfixed) meanings but not syntactic categories. Therefore, their interpretation may change flexibly depending on where they are and what category the language user assigns to them.

Another interesting observation is that in languages with sentence-final particles, the function of such particles is quite similar to that of emojis, as in Mandarin Chinese.

(6) a. Zhù nǐ chénggōng o! “Wish you success [😊]” b. Zhōuyī búcuò en… “Monday is not bad [😔]…”

Similar things seem to be happening in other languages, too. In my own case, for example, I am often tempted to add either “LOL” [😂] or “XD” [😝] at the end of English sentences, as in (7).

(7) a. That’s cool [😂].              b. I dunno [😝]…

So, in languages without ‘official’ sentence-final particles, emojis are potential candidates for the role, as least in the written informal register. And they are even more powerful than the real sentence-final particles, thanks to their rich visual effects and easily enlargeable inventory.

Picture source: [1] http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/

Ask Chris: I always feel that differences between cultures and differences between languages are somehow correlated, although linguists seem not to stress that. How do you see the influence of cultural differences on the differences between languages? Do you think the influence of cultural diversity on language has been severely underestimated in linguistics?

Chris answers: To be frank, after I started answering the questions online, I found that so many people tried to bind language and culture together, which is, from the point of view of a linguist-to-be, a bit annoying. The point is not that linguists do not, cannot, or should not put language and culture together, but that we have connected them properly in terms of the scientific research of language, while people outside the field of linguistics always believe that we need to do more – when there is nothing more to be done. If you ask me to estimate the influence of cultural diversity on language, I will say that it is far from what you describe as an “underestimation.” I should admit that the current focus of linguistics is not on the correlation between cross-linguistic diversity and cultural diversity, and we do not have an adequate explanation for the reason of any such correlation. But that is not to admit that we are ‘underestimating’ such influence of cultural diversity. And I hope you will get why I say so after reading the following.

We can now say that at a particular stage in the history of linguistics (or philology) the influence of language diversity was overestimated. By saying so, I am referring to the famous book titled The heterogeneity of language and its influence on the intellectual development of mankind by Wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as the popularisation of linguistic relativity. The latter one is more frequently called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but since Sapir and Whorf never collaborated to produce such a hypothesis, it is actually inappropriate to use that name. Both pieces of work suggest, based on different evidence, that the structure of a language can influence the cognition of the speakers of that language, and also that to some extent the culture established by those speakers can influence the structure of the language. Von Humboldt’s book was first published in 1836, while Edward Sapir was active in the first decades of the 20th century; the idea of the correlation between cultural diversity and linguistic diversity was rather popular a hundred years ago.

So why is it no longer as popular? That boils down to the linguistic analysis of a language. The word ‘language’ I use here includes not only the systematic structure of a language (‘langue’ as per de Saussure), but also the conventions of speech shared by the speakers of that language (akin to ‘parole’ as per de Saussure). By analysing how culture can and cannot influence a language, we can establish how far the influence of cultural diversity can go. Fortunately, comparative descriptive linguistics and socio-linguistics provide a series of fruitful clues to us, and that’s why I’m rather confident when answering your question.

The systematic structure of a language includes the sound system (the choice of phonetic inventory, the structure of a syllable, the phonological rules when we put sounds or syllables together etc.), the so-called ‘grammar’ structure (the structure of a word, the structure of a sentence, etc.), and the meanings of the language. Neither the sound system nor the grammar structure is significantly influenced by culture, if we observe carefully the differences and similarities between different languages. We can find similar sounds and structures from two historically unrelated languages whose speakers are from two totally different cultures, while at the same time we can get different sounds and structures from two languages whose speakers are friendly neighbours. It would be astonishing to everyone if Germans in Europe and Kashmiris in South Asia were observed to share a similar culture, just because both of the languages need the main verb to appear in the second position of a sentence. So you see, it is not very plausible to establish reliable links between cultures and linguistic structures, at least based on what we know at this point in time; I hope you agree when I say that culture and the (sound or grammar) structure of a language are independent of each other.

That established, we can move onto the meaning system. Meaning can be divided into two parts: propositional semantics – what a sentence mean –, and lexical semantics – what a single word means. In general, propositional semantics is universal: we are able to use a sentence to express meaning, and the way we pile up words to get meaning is roughly the same across cultures. You may want to say, “wait, but in some case a sentence may have different meanings in different cultures”; I know, but please save that for later, because that is not the meaning we get by combining words together. The word meaning, especially the connection between a word and a concept, is another story. Word meaning is more susceptible to cultural diversity in two aspects. Firstly, different cultures may have different classifications of concepts and different prototypes for a concept, and that can be reflected in the matching between a word and a concept. Years ago, when I stumbled upon the question for the first time, I gave the example of sweetcorn and potatoes (see here): potatoes are classified as vegetables in Chinese, while it is a prototype of starchy foods in English; sweetcorn is the opposite. Such differences are pervasive, even in household terms: just last week I  had a discussion with my supervisor, whose native language is Dutch, on whether a glass is a cup. It is all about how concepts are categorised and represented prototypically in a culture, and factors like these can definitely influence the language in use.

Furthermore, there are some culture-based concepts that can only be described in the language associated with that culture. This includes normal words and idiomatic expressions. For example, traditional Chinese medical practitioners believe that anger comes from the heat in the liver, so many Chinese sayings connect liver and anger: for example, ‘I’m so angry that my liver hurts’, or ‘She got fire in her liver.’ Expressions like these would be far from comprehensible to my British colleagues unless they have some experience of alternative therapy. Such concepts and the corresponding verbal expressions are again culture-specific and subject to the influence of cultural diversity. Although we do not have a systematic analysis of the reasons for such differences, we can find books and journal articles on the comparison between languages spoken in two cultures.

In terms of the non-structural part of language, such as the conventions and rules of language use, we may observe more influence of cultural diversity on language. Maybe you have noticed that more linguists (perhaps many sociolinguists) are starting to talk about ‘intercultural communication.’ That is because cultural diversity may influence the manners of communication, and thus influence the language an individual uses. Sometimes we talk about how ‘people from Culture A talk directly and people from Culture B talks indirectly’; such ‘directness’ or ‘indirectness’ is not related to the structure of the language they use, but whether they use implicatures to convey their intended meaning or not. The strategies of politeness and the preferences of implicature are both related to cultures. In sociolinguistics, we investigate the act of speaking between people in different cultures, and we see that even the use of silence and the competition of turn-taking vary from group to group. When the ‘language’ we discuss is not limited to the linguistic system, and when it extends to become the medium of communication in a community, we can see that cultural diversity plays an important role to influence the language.

However, we should always make a clear cut between the structural and non-structural parts of language – they are not equal, and sometimes not even related to each other. In the real world, a language is not tied up with a culture, or vice versa. Speech activity, just like one’ preferences for eating, drinking and clothing, and also rituals and ceremonies, is a part of the customs shared by a community, but language is not. It is highly likely that we change some traditions of speech activity without influencing the structure of that language, or switch to another linguistic code without changing the speech traditions. To simplify a little bit, it is like ladies wearing trousers or skirts: no matter what you select to wear, the trousers and skirts themselves will not change at all, and the fact that we need to wear something to cover our lower part will not change either.

There may be ways in which cultural diversity influences language that we are not able to observe yet, maybe because we still do not have a good methodology to quantify cultural diversity. But that is not because we are not paying attention to such influences. Now you may understand why I have chosen ‘Give back to culture what is culture’s’ as the title for this answer: we do need a clear cut here, even for people who do not study linguistics. Give back to culture what is culture’s, and to language what is language’s.

  To have a look at how culture may influence language, you may want to read these:

Basso, Keith H. 1970. ‘“To Give up on Words”: Silence in Western Apache Culture’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 26.3: 213–30

Jarvis, Scott, and Aneta Pavlenko. 2008. Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition (Routledge)

Link, Perry. 2013. An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press)

A few years ago, I attended a friend’s party, during which she introduced me to her other friends: “Have you met my friend Li? She’s from Vietnam, and she talks about future things in the present.” This line stayed with me for a very long time, as up till then, it never occurred to me that the way I spoke English constituted a salient part of my identity, and that there was possibly a link between “from Vietnam” and the “use of present tense” for future events. This incident sparked my interest in how Vietnamese learners use English, and in particular, how this variety of English treats tense and aspect in everyday discourse. I then decided to pursue this enquiry further by gathering data from recorded natural conversations and Facebook posts[1]. Results suggest two conspicuous variants in Vietnamese learners’ treatment of tense and aspect: (1) the use of non-conjugated verbs and/or misuse of conjugated verbs, and (2) preference for simple present tense when referring to future events.

Time, Tense and Aspect

In linguistics, tense is a deictic category that functions to situate an event in a chronological order in relation to other events, and aspect deals with speakers’ subjective perception of the situation: as complete, in progress, having duration, beginning, ending, or being repeated. Tense and aspect are universal grammatical categories that are present in most languages, although the coding systems of these categories vary from language to language.

As an oversimplified contrastive description, tense and aspect are encoded in finite verbs in English while they are not overtly marked in Vietnamese, but rather understood from the context. English makes a three-way distinction between present, past, and future tense, with only present and past tense triggering verbal inflection. Present tense is unmarked (Ø) by default, and marked with the -(e)s morpheme when the subject is 3SG. Past tense is realised with the suffix –ed for regular verbs. Futurity is usually realised with the modal ‘will’ followed by a bare infinitive, but it can also be realised through other means such as phrasal modals, or the present progressive simple present tense with time adverbials.

Unfortunately, it’s not that obvious in Vietnamese. Consider the following Vietnamese sentence:

(*) Chị ấy         khóc

3SG.F                cry

This can be translated as ‘she cries’, ‘she cried’, she was crying’, or ‘she has been crying’ depending on the context. Vietnamese does not rely on verbal inflection to indicate tense or aspect, but rather on other designated lexical or pragmatic devices. Although Vietnamese has particles such as rồi [completed], đã [past], đang [progressive], and sẽ [future] to mark time/state when required (Dam 2001), those particles are often dropped when time adverbials such as hôm qua (yesterday), ngày mai (tomorrow), bây giờ (now), trước đây (before) are present.

Data

To investigate Vietnamese learners’ variety of English when it comes to treatment of tense and aspect, three natural conversations of 3 – 5 minutes each between a Vietnamese parent learning English and an Australian-born child were recorded, with the parents’ and children’s oral consent. Additionally, I also gained access to 50 Facebook posts by Vietnamese learners. Half of this dataset were from a private Facebook group consisting of Vietnamese learners who have been in Australia for more than 10 years, and the other half were from Vietnamese learners living in Vietnam. This mixed selection was solely for the purpose of getting a good overview of the variety used by a random population of Vietnamese learners, rather than to find out whether there is a difference between two groups. In order to ensure that the features identified are indeed part of the Vietnamese learners’ variety rather than a result of an individual error, I work on the principle that a feature only counts as significant if it occurs for at least three times across the dataset, and in case of the Facebook posts, by at least three different speakers.

Result

The use of non-conjugated verbs and/or misuse of conjugated verbs

Due to Vietnamese famously lacking inflectional morphology, it is predictable that the codification of English conjugated verbs is problematic for many Vietnamese learners. Data gathered show strong evidence that Vietnamese learners tend to omit the inflectional morpheme of the verb when progressive or perfect aspect is in use. Consider the following data:

(1) P: TJ have you write your homework?

C: Not yet.

P: Why don’t you do it while I am cook dinner

(2) “Dad is happy and comfortable and has enjoy all the visits of family.”

(3) “hello Ireland. itz turn cool here in DN but no sunshine…envy you!”

As the examples show, speakers tend to use bare infinitives following the auxiliary ‘have’ in the perfective construction (1 & 2), and bare infinitive following the auxiliary ‘be’ in the progressive construction (1 & 3). Given that Vietnamese has no morphology on the verb, this tendency towards bare infinitives is likely to be a result of Vietnamese learners’ language transfer. Speakers naturally transfer the skills and patterns they acquired in their first language into their second language. It is also worth considering that, as inflectional morphemes (particularly the word-final /s/) are small, redundant and not permissible in Vietnamese phonotactics, they are less likely to be perceived by Vietnamese learners.

Preference for simple present tense when referring to future events

Another salient feature, which also served as an impetus for this study, is Vietnamese learners’ tendency to use the simple present tense to refer to future events. Consider the following sentences:

(4) “Sunday family picnic at Floriade.

I am suggesting a family day out at Floriade. We buy food at Floriade, nice photos are taken and there is a lot to see and do there. So we come to Thao Thi for breakfast and then go to Floriade for a picnic lunch. It is a rare opportunity for all of us to get together outdoor, with Trang/Nghia family here too.”

(5) C: Dad have you called iinet?

P: I do it

C: Have you already done it? Or are you going to?

P: I do it tomorrow

Although futurity in Vietnamese can be marked by the particle sẽ [future] (equivalent of ‘will’ in English), this particle is often dropped when a time abverbial is present, or when the time of the event could be inferred from the context. Language transfer is apparent in example 5 – when the father responds to the child “I do it” with an implication that ‘I have not done it, but I will do it.’ However, the child – an English speaker – is confused by the answer and has to seek clarification as to whether this action has already been done, or will be done later. Even in response to the child’s follow-up question, the father still does not adopt the modal ‘will,’ but makes his intended meaning clearer by inserting the time adverbial ‘tomorrow.’

On a similar yet rather different note, example 4 presents an interesting case when the Vietnamese learners’ preference for the present tense for future events gives the sentence a different reading in English – the habitual aspect. Without the background context, it appears as though this group frequently buys food at Floriade and takes photos. The subsequent sentence “So we come to Thao Thi for breakfast and then go to Floriade for a picnic lunch” creates a similar impression. This then makes a nice example of possible mismatches between form and meaning when two varieties of the same language come into contact, with the structurally variant feature generating derived semantic effects.

[1] This includes Facebook statuses and Facebook comments.

References:

Dam, Phap 2001, Old habits die hard: Persistent errors in English written by Vietnamese speakers. A paper presented at National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) Annual Conference, February. 20-24, 2001 in Phoenix, Arizona. Retrieved online on 15 October 2015 at http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED453672

Brunelle, Marc 2014, “Vietnamese”. In: J Mathias & P Sidwell (Eds), The handbook of Austroasiatic languages. Leiden Boston Brill, pp. 909-953.

I’ve got a confession to make. I love pop science books. Sometimes, as an academicky type, I wonder whether I should, as there are so many interesting hard-core research articles and weighty tomes to read, and so little time. But actually, there are some good reasons to read pop linguistics books, even if you are a linguist. I’m talking here mostly about books written by academics for a general audience, rather than those sometimes poorly researched compendiums that adorn bookshop tables in the run-up to Christmas. Here are my top 3 reasons to read linguistics books aimed at a general audience, and top book recommendations for this week.

1. Broaden your horizons. Poking your head out from your own research nook and finding what’s going on in other crannies is not only interesting but can spark new ideas and make you aware of connections you hadn’t previously seen. And what better way of doing that than with a book you can relax with on the beach, in the bath, or under the bedsheets. 2. Get the bigger picture. At least in my neck of the linguistic woods, developments tend to be announced in journal articles and conference papers rather than books, and therefore are often very tightly focussed. It’s so easy to get bogged down in experiment methodology, stimuli, or statistics. A book helps you to see the wood for the trees, especially one that’s written for non-specialists and so has a strong narrative thread or polemic stance. 3. Be inspired. Some academics I’ve met seem to find the idea of public engagement ridiculous or unnecessary. I wonder whether it’s because there’s an implicit threat that ‘your research isn’t worth anything, unless you package it up so it’s useful to some other community, right now!’ But reading great pop science books makes it so clear that that’s not the case at all. Of course, research work has its own value, and this goes hand-in-hand with communicating it far and wide.

On my bookshelf: 1. The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker Every linguistics undergrad comes up to university equipped with some Steven Pinker. Usually it’s The Language Instinct that transforms every young reader from an intuitive Sapir-Whorfian to a fully-formed nativist. But, being a pragmatician myself, I would commend this later work, which unpacks some key themes in semantics and pragmatics, while being full of delightful and witty examples.

2. Neurotribes, Steve Silberman This isn’t strictly about language per se, but it still makes the cut. It’s a history of thinking and research on autistic spectrum disorder – which of course can profoundly affect communication and language – and for those of a younger generation for whom the condition is now common parlance, this book is truly eye-opening. I would never have thought that a whole chapter on the development of a diagnostic tool could be a page-turner, but this book kept me up late on several occasions.

3. Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough Another not-quite-language offering: this book is about memory. And of course, without memory we have no language. Written by a psychologist-cum-author, it’s a beautiful introduction to the wonderful, mysterious world of our memory, and the tragedy of losing it. Psycholinguistics classes are often filled with mysterious initials, like ‘JBR’ and ‘MD’ – famous case studies of aphasia, where the person has lost some aspect of language (which can be as broad as productive syntax, or as narrow as words for particular categories like vegetables), often as the results of a stroke or other brain damage. But the focus on the – admittedly fascinating – insights this gives us into language itself can make us forget the tragic consequences for these people’s lives. This book is a moving reminder.

4. Speaking Our Minds, Thomas Scott-Phillips This is a beautifully – and forcefully – argued treaty on how human communication is so special. Scott-Phillips explains how when we talk with one another, we’re not just doing encoding and decoding, like a machine, but a complex process of inferencing about each other’s intentions. These kind of observations have been very influential in one of the main areas of linguistic study – pragmatics – over the last half century, and this book also adds an evolutionary perspective (though disclaimer: I haven’t read those chapters yet).

5. Wordsmiths & Warriors, David and Hilary Crystal There had to be something from our British resident celebrity linguist on the list. There are too many books to choose from here, but a fun recent(ish) addition is this linguistic guide to UK, complete with photos. The entries are varied – they could be about a place with some significant connection to the history of English, the location of an important historical linguistic source, the home of some important linguistic work – and complete with photographs.

How can you tell if the East-Asian-looking faces you see on the street are Korean, Chinese, or Japanese, if you don’t know their languages at all? The trick for you is to listen out for their exclamations. When hearing something surprising, Koreans are most likely to go, uhhhh? [ʌ][i], the Chinese, ahhhh? [ɐ], and the Japanese, ehhhh? [ɛ], all with a rising intonation. (For those who are not familiar with IPA symbols, you can listen to the sounds here.)

  These observations led me to this informal pilot study on the cross-linguistic use of vowels in the exclamation of surprise. The chart below shows some of the questions I had in mind.

There were at least five different types of surprise I could identify, as summarised in the figure below: Disgust (and surprise), Pain (and surprise, and so on), Terror, Disbelief, and Pure Surprise. I gave my informants a couple ofspecific scenarios, to make sure we were all on the same page about what we mean by each type of surprise. I was only interested in the vowel quality, so I disregarded the following variables, though they are also potentially very interesting to look at: consonants that occur with the vowels, other linguistic aspects such as intonation, duration, nasality and voice quality, words with a specific meaning, such as whaaaat?, Reeeeally?, and Nooooo!, and all kinds of swear words.

  [i] I used audio illustrations by Peter Ladefoged as a reference to exact sound qualities denoted by the International Phonetic Alphabet. http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/vowels.html

When I was young and naive, I used to think that as native speakers we automatically have full understanding of our language. Why wouldn’t we, after the long boring infant days (or nights for nocturnal babies) of deciphering meaningful signals from the chaotic and often not-so-meaningful conversations of adults (and other babies)? However, my confidence got crunched when I became a Mandopop (Mandarin popular music) fan, for not only do singers frequently create their own vocabulary, but even the ordinary language fragments also become difficult to grasp. For example, I heard (1) when I was 14.

(1) Ba  wo-de    xingyun-cao   zhongzai    ni-de             meng-tian. —-BA I-POSS   lucky-grass      grow-at      you-POSS   dream-field —“Grow my four-leaved clover in your dream field.” (‘Love’ by The Little Tigers)

This is the first time I have ever encountered the two-syllable string meng-tian. It doesn’t exist in my mental dictionary, and without knowing which characters are used to write it, it’s simply impossible to interpret, for each syllable has four possible tones, and each tone further has a number of homophones with different meanings. The chances of picking out the correct tones and combining them into the correct meanings are not very high!

Chinese characters for ‘dream-field’ [1]

The failure to recognize randomly coined words can leave you confused, but the failure to parse a sentence correctly can leave you with a very false interpretation of what the lyrics are saying. I remember wrongly parsing (3) and (4):

(3) a. Mimimama       shi  wo-de      zi-zun. (O = Original) ——-thickly dotted   is     I-POSS    self-esteem ——“Thickly dotted is my self-esteem.” (‘Growth Rings’ by Diamond Zhang) —-b. Ni    mama   shuo  wo-de    zi-sun. (M = Mine) ——your mom     say      I-POSS  son-grandson —–“Your mom says: ‘my sons and grandsons.’”

Well, I did wonder for a moment how likely my understanding could be correct – it doesn’t sound like a daily scenario after all. But as an open-minded person I decided to accept it, considering that the artistic world can be very dramatic. Google says many others have also misheard “thickly dotted” as “your mom”, and in my honest opinion, the original line doesn’t make much more sense.

(4) a. Ruguo…zai    jiao-hui        shi    neng   renzhu-le      jidong-de   linghun. (O) ——-if…be-at       cross-meet   time  can      refrain-ASP  excited        soul ——“If we could have refrained our excited souls when we met each other.” (‘The Most Familiar Stranger’ by Elva Hsiao) —-b. Ruguo…zai   jiaohui   shi   nan-ren          zhu-le                 jidu-de   linghun. (M) ——-if…be-at        church    be    male-person  dominate-ASP  Christ’s   soul ——“If it were the man that had dominated Christ’s soul in the church.”

When I realized I had been so wrong, I was both shocked and amazed, because my mind had successfully picked all the wrong tones/meanings and grouped them into wrong constituents, which is just as great an achievement as doing everything correctly! I guess what triggered my mistake is the singer’s vague pronunciation of neng. She pronounced [ɤ] in a quite open way (like [ʌ]). Then I wrongly grouped neng and ren together as nan-ren ‘male-person’, which in turn forced me to analyze zhu as a main verb zhu3 ‘dominate’ (it is an aspectual verb zhu4 in the original lyrics), leading to the subsequent parsing mistakes. How important it is to articulate clearly!

Four tones in Mandarin Chinese [2]

So, a major cause of the wild misunderstandings in Mandopop seems to be the masking of lexical tones and word boundaries by melody and rhythm. There are so many homophonous morphemes in Chinese that tones become a crucial part of lexical information, and there is so little morphological marking that prosodic properties become significant cues for successful parsing. Therefore, when these two sources of information are blurred, we are left quite helpless and can only rely on massive lexicon searching, guessing, and context matching, which work well for frequent items like jiao4hui4 ‘church’ but horribly for unfamiliar or even randomly coined items like jiao1-hui4 ‘cross-meet’ and meng4-tian2 ‘dream-field’.

Luckily, since the Chinese characters don’t rely on pronunciation to convey meaning, a single glance at the lyrics would help us achieve a 100% successful parsing rate in most cases, unless the sentence is inherently ambiguous, as in the following mobile phone commercial. I’m not even sure which reading would be more appreciated by customers!

(5) Mai3  shou3ji1    song4              lao3po2 ! —-buy    mobile      send as gift    wife —“Intended: buy a mobile phone for your wife!” —“Alternative: buy a mobile phone and we’ll send you a wife as gift!”

Not being able to efficiently parse what you hear can be tough, but from another perspective it can also be beneficial, because it gives you the interesting experience of imagining all sorts of possible meanings. Some images may be weird, but some may be aesthetically enchanting. I myself have been very satisfied with my misunderstanding of the following lyrics (obviously I’m a fan of Jay Chou).

(6) a. Wo zai       deng  mo-zhui,             huo-yan   tunshi  wu-ming-bei. (O) ——-I      be-at  wait   magic-pendant fire-flame devour no-name-stele ——“I’m waiting for the magic pendant; the fire is devouring the nameless stele.” (“Dragon Rider” by Jay Chou) —-b. Wo  zai      deng mo    zhui, huo-yan    tunshi   wo ming fei. (M) ——–I      be-at  wait devil  fall    fire-flame  devour  my  life     fly ——“I’m waiting for the devil‘s fall; the fire is devouring me and my life flows away.”

(7) a. Ju       yi-ba                yue,       shou   lan             huiyi        zenme   shui? (O) ——-hold    one-handful   moon,   hand   embrace  memory  how       sleep —–“I hold a handful of moon (from the water); how can I sleep with memory embraced in my hands?” (“Preface to Orchid Pavilion” by Jay Chou) —-b. Ju                         yi          ba-yue,             shou   ran    huiyi         zenme   shui? (M) ——-chrysanthemum    already   eight-month,  hand   dye   memory  how       sleep —–“The chrysanthemums are already August-like; how can I sleep with memory dyed into my hands.”

I listened to both songs when they first came out – both in the 2008 album Capricorn –­ without having access to the lyrics. So I made the effort to guess what the singer was singing, which is very difficult because of his famous ‘mumbling’ style. I wrote down what I thought I was hearing, and when I finally saw the lyrics, I realized I had written my own songs!

Nowadays I no longer have the time or patience to do lyrics guessing, but the parsing difficulty of Mandopop lyrics hasn’t changed a bit. Recently I’ve been listening to Jay Chou’s 2016 new album Jay Chou’s Bedtime Stories but haven’t bothered reading the lyrics, so maybe it’s time to pick up my old hobby. Let me know if you want to join me or simply want to know more about Mandopop! 🙂

Picture source: [1] http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1033631-chinese-character-for-dream-meng-%E5%A4%A2/    http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1133160-chinese-character-for-fields-tian-%E7%94%B0/  [2] http://www.kailindesign.com/sitone/

When prescriptivism gets mentioned, the formidable Académie Française inevitably crops up. The French Academy – beacon of proper French, publisher of dictionaries, and watchdog of all utterances – is regularly mentioned for its fight against Anglicisms, bringing down one loanword at a time: you send un courriel rather than an email, using a laptop that runs a certain logiciel, rather than software. Time to break for ‘le weekend’? Don’t even dream of it.

There may be more than a hint of over-exaggeration in how the media and popular linguistics report about the Academy’s antics (and with the Academy calling its members les immortels ‘immortals’, it’s not exactly helping its cause), but whatever the truth, it casts a bit of an Orwellian shadow on the idea of language institutes. There’s no equivalent governing body for the English language – which is why some English speakers like to think of their language as more liberated than the supposedly oppressed French – but broadening one’s prescriptivist horizons shows that language institutes really aren’t that totalitarian. I bring to you the Finnish take on the matter – Kotus.

“Time to break for le weekend? Don’t even dream of it.”

Just like its French counterpart, Kotus (or Kotimaisten Kielten Keskus, Institute for the Languages of Finland) is a state-run body. It’s in charge of the study and planning of Finland’s two official languages, Finnish and Swedish, steering and developing language standards and compiling dictionaries, as well as coordinating some of the work on the official minority languages Sami, Romani, and Finnish Sign Language. Researchers find materials in its archives and corpora, while people confused about correct language use can turn to their linguistic guidance and counselling services. It’s not that different from Ghostbusters, really: if there’s something strange in your text, who you gonna call? Kotus!

Also like Ghostbusters, Kotus moves with the times. It accepts that language changes, and that its rules aren’t set in stone, even if that were to give it some extra gravitas.

Katariina and Vilhelm having a little snog there. Credit: murielle29

Ever heard of Prince Yrjö of England? No? I’m talking about the product of the St Andrews -based love story of Vilhelm and Katariina? Still no? Well, worry not, for neither have most Finnish people – under those guises. I’m talking about the Duke, Duchess, and Prince of Cambridge. In the olden days, all royal Georges were referred to as Yrjö, Catherines/ Katherines as Katariina, and Williams as Vilhelm. Mentioning that Yrjö’s aunt Pippa once made Rear of the Year would have been a giveaway, though, not only because of the esteemed prize but because names outside the standard royal paradigm have never been translated, nor will they be in the future. In 2002, the Institute recommended that future European monarchs be referred to with their native names: all Georges up to George VI will continue to be Yrjös, but when the next George hops on the thrown, there won’t be any funny naming business. Other countries still like to hold onto nativising names: in Latvia, for example, the US elections battle was fought between Donalds Tramps and Hilarija Klintone.

Not all Finnish loanwords bow to originals as they do to monarchs, though. In keeping with modern times, puzzled language users can now contact Kotus through a chat function on their website – only instead of chat, the interface referred to as tsätti. While both forms are used in Finnish, and both are equally accepted by the Institute, Kotus defends its choice to use the latter with an argument for user friendliness. Tsätti eliminates issues with the non-Finnish ch-sound ([tʃ] for the phonetically inclined) by replacing it with the more manageable ts. It also conveys a degree of casualness: a rather different approach from naming one’s workers les immortels.

Farao or faarao? Just chill. Credit: Damian Gadal.

Going casual is not just about appearances, either. Going against the Académie Française stereotype of extreme conservatism, Kotus is quite happy to acknowledge that variation is a thing in language. Back in the 70s, the correct spelling and pronunciation for ‘pharaoh’ was ruled as farao over its rival faarao with a long vowel, the former form being backed up by its appearance in the Bible. But in the latest issue of the Kotus journal, the happy news that faarao is back on the cards was announced. As the variation persisted throughout the decades, there was no point in clinging on to the superficially imposed form, et voilà (loanwords are totally cool, too), both the alternative forms were officially approved.

Revealing how Kotus oppresses people in a Nineteen Eighty-Four way would probably have attracted more readers. Alas, no – go and enjoy your freedom in using Finnish.

The recent sci-fi film Arrival has re-brought linguistics into the public’s eyes, with an alien language that is powerful enough to reshape speakers’ minds and enable them to see the future. While linguists outside the screen are not so sure if alien languages are really like that, our own language capacity is potentially spectacular enough to impress the arriving aliens and inspire a movie on their planet. [1]

Language is something that everyone uses in our daily life. It comes so naturally to us that we seldom stop and think about its marvelous intricacy. At a distance, the human language is no less a godly design than the physical universe; in fact, it offers us a mental universe. While sci-fi lovers enjoy imagining time travel and parallel universe, these features have always been there in the mechanics of our language. We can talk about things that happened a million years ago and those that might happen in a million years, and we can also propose various possible outcomes in different possible worlds under miscellaneous conditions. Moreover, in a sense, the thousands of different languages spoken in the world are themselves one and another “parallel universe”, where a tiny parametric change may lead to grammatical systems as different as English and Japanese.

Although the word “language” is etymologically “tongue”, the diversity of human language is not restricted to the tongue. While language is a human nature rooted in our minds, it can find its way out through various channels (a procedure called “externalization”). Theoretically speaking, every sensory modality can develop its own language form. The auditory modality supports spoken language, the visual modality supports sign language, and the recently discovered haptic language is presumably supported by the somatosensory modality. Yet, all these amazingly different language forms eventually lead to the same (or equivalent) meanings in the conceptual-intentional system. We use different languages, but we can understand each other.

There is a recent Cambridge Festival of Ideas short firm called Talk with Your Hands: Communicating Across the Sensory Spectrum, which nicely explores the idea of cross-modality language experience. Through a series of interviews, the producers –  Craig Pearson, Julio Chenchen Song, Toby Smith – present to the audience how language is experienced in different modalities and briefly introduce the grammatical mechanisms of sign language, which features simultaneous externalization of multiple words unlike the linear externalization (one word at a time) in spoken language. Although this sensorimotor non-linearity is not as magic as the non-linearity of the alien language in Arrival (which presumably involves a non-linear conceptual-intentional system), it is already powerful enough to endow the level of flexibility to sign language that spoken language can only covet.

As Dr. Matt Davis (neuroscientist) and Dr. Víctor Acedo-Matellán (linguist) point out in the short film, language is the capacity that sets us apart from all other animals, and sign language is not a direct translation or substitute for spoken language, but a completely independent natural language. Indeed, all natural languages are equally well-equipped to express the infinite ideas human beings want to articulate. The Cambridge Shorts communications officer writes: “in just ten minutes, Talk with Your Hands conveys the richness of verbal and non-verbal languages and explores how our senses overlap and merge.”

For the arriving aliens, language is a weapon; for us it is the same. If language is the foundation of human intelligence, then everything that comes with language, including its diversity, flexibility, and creativity, are direct reflections of intelligence. Can aliens or AIs also possess such a language system? The former, we don’t know; the latter, let’s wait and see.

  [1] Picture source: http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2016/11/arrival-proves-that-first-contact-movies-can-still-blow-your-mind/

After singular they was declared word of the year for 2015, the word attracted unprecedented strong online reaction. Despite the split opinions seen and heard on and outside the Internet, my recent research in Australia found that the use of they as a singular pronoun is gaining approval as a ‘correct’ way to speak.

277 people across all different age groups were asked to provide their evaluation of ‘correct/ incorrect/ I don’t know’ over 5 sentences, condensed in the form of a listening task and a written task. Results show an interesting contrastive trend for spoken and written data. While most participants judged singular they as ‘Correct’ in spoken discourse, the opinion is divided among native speakers and non-native speakers when it comes to written sentences, as illustrated in Figure 1:

Figure 1: Assessment of Singular They by native and non-native speakers in written discourse

Such even split proportion across both groups of speakers is perhaps the evidence of a linguistics feature in transition, a point where a part of society is less resistant, and others are more so towards the change. In other words, singular they stays ‘below the radar’ but is still more or less noticeable.

Interestingly, almost 80% of participants recognised singular they (and its genitive form) as a preference to stay ‘politically correct’. When being asked to assess the supposedly correct form of pronoun in  the sentence ‘Each student must write his ID number on the exam’, speakers’ discomfort with the ‘sexist implication’ in the word ‘his’ was prevalent and clearly expressed. Many respondents suggest ‘their’ as a ‘better way to say it’, or unless ‘it is a room full of boys’. The use of singular they then can be seen as speakers’ solution to the inherent lack of a singular, gender-neutral third person pronoun in English. The need becomes even more pronounced in wake of the ongoing social and global effort to advocate for gender inclusion and equality. It is also quite interesting that the speakers’ uncertainty about Singular they (manifested in their answer ‘I don’t know’ ) is most observed within the middle pack of the Age groups (18-30 & 31-65), while being completely absent in the other two ends of the spectrum (Under 17 and 66 plus). How come? I am inclined to hypothesise that speakers who are within their socially active period (working, adult life) are more likely to be flexible in their judgement of what constitutes linguistically ‘standard’, possibly due to their ongoing, consistent exposure to various ways of speaking and writing.

As one of my participants neatly summarised, ‘Everyone does that [i.e. using they and its genitive form as singular pronouns], even though they don’t know they do.’  The use of singular they in particular, and the ‘standard form’ of English generally, then perhaps should be seen as a fluid, relative concept rather than a hard and fast set of rules that dictate language use. Many grammar prescriptivists may still disagree, but of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Ask Chris: I’m a native speaker of English and currently learning Mandarin but the word order seems to be different from typical SVO languages like English. For example,

‘把书本拿给我’ (give me the books) – SVO should be “拿书本给我”

‘从家里出去’ (leaving from the house) – How about “出去从家里”

‘他在家里睡觉’ (He sleeps at home) – Why is it not “他睡觉在家里”

Many of these sentences in Mandarin put the verb at the end after the object, instead of putting it before the object. So I really wonder if Mandarin Chinese is a real SVO language.

(Attention: This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters.)

Chris answers: … Well I really did not expect that someone whose native language is not Chinese would like to ask me a question. Let’s talk about the issues in a straightforward way, just to make everything clearer. Basically you got two problems in your descriptions – yes, those are your problems. In your first sentence, you mix up the ba structure and the unmarked order of Standard Mandarin Chinese. That is quite common, even for a beginner syntactician who has little or limited knowledge of Standard Chinese; so that is not your fault, and just take it easy. But your second problem is that you do not – or maybe just fail to – differentiate objects and prepositional phrases; that will be a horrible problem. Considering that last year I received a question about the word order of Archaic Chinese and this time I got yours, I would like to provide a somewhat up-to-date summary of the history of word order of Chinese, set in an earlier Chomskyan view called ‘Principles and Parameter’”, and drawing from my intuition as a Chinese native speaker.

The most common, unmarked order of the Chinese language, including both Standard Mandarin Chinese and Archaic Chinese, is SVO; that is a historical issue I would like to address before we move to the analysis of Standard Mandarin Chinese. Once there was an argument about the SVO or SOV order of Archaic Chinese. Li and Thompson (1974), for example, hold the opinion that Archaic Chinese should have SOV order, since quite a few of the Sino-Tibetan languages now have that order. Little evidence, however, is discovered for that argument; most of the literary records of Archaic Chinese, especially the pre-Qin documents, demonstrate the features of an SVO language rather than an SOV one. Granted, Archaic Chinese has some structures that follow SOV order, but as far as I can tell, none of the structures is fully ‘unmarked’. For example, an unmarked sentence favours nominal structures as its subject and direct object, and no additional particle should be present in the sentence, but those sentences with SOV order either include a particular particle that triggers the SOV structure, or contain a pronoun as its direct object. In a typical unmarked sentence, such as ‘孟子(S)见(V)梁惠王(O)’ (Mencius met (or visited) King Hui of Liang), you can see that both the subject and the object are nouns (proper names), and the order is definitely SVO. The feature of SVO has been inherited by Middle Chinese, and then Standard Mandarin Chinese today.

As for Standard Chinese, an unmarked sentence, like ‘我今天吃了个苹果’ (I today eat-PAR CLA apple), is also definitely SVO; even for sentences containing a pronoun as the object, like “我揍了他” (I punch-PAR him), the word order is still SVO. Without the presence of a word like ‘把’ (ba) and ‘被’ (bei), and without the movement of the topic, the word order is always SVO; you can never find a sentence presenting an SOV order. This is the common view  shared by syntacticians in Europe (Continental and UK); maybe those horrible Americans have some other ideas that I don’t know of.

So that argument answers your final question: yes, Standard Mandarin Chinese is an SVO language.

So how can we interpret your sentences in that way? Before I go further into the field of Chinese, I would like to stray a bit and talk about another language: German.

German main clauses demonstrate a variety of word orders, including SVO, VSO, OVS, SAOV, and even OASV if you pay enough attention to the language (A stands for an auxiliary verb, like ‘did’ or ‘have’ in English). But most commonly it is known as having V2-SOV order; that is, in a main clause, the verb will always be in the second position, while it will be at the end of a subordinate clause. I mention the structure of German, mainly to point out that it is possible for a language to have numerous word orders besides its unmarked order; the world is not made up of English, which only allows a limited number of word orders.

Let’s move back to Chinese then. Example 1 in the question is quite a complicated one involving both a double-object construction and the presence of ba; so it will take me longer and more examples to illustrate the variations in Standard Mandarin Chinese. Firstly, I would like to discuss the double-object construction, which means that the main verb is ditransitive, has three theta-roles, and requires three nouns (or nominal constructions) in a grammatical sentence; the three nouns will be the subject (S), direct object (DO), and indirect object (IO) respectively. For a typical ditransitive verb, like “给” (give), the unmarked word order will be:

(1). 他给了我一本书。 He give-PAR me one-CLA book. – in the form of S-V-IO-DO.

In this case, the word order of Standard Chinese is exactly the same as that of English, which is a typical SVO language: ‘he gave me a book’. The ditransitive verb construction is usually referred to as a VP-shell structure; for those who are interested in how Chomsky and his fellows solve the problem of the theta-role assignment of a ditransitive structure, just type this word into Google and you will get piles of literature.

Then we talk about the application of ba in constructions with a transitive (not ditransitive) verb. The nature of ba is rather complicated and even controversial; here I would like to follow the light verb assumption (gladly we have Julio’s post on light verbs; that saves my day), in which the nature of ba is a bit similar (but not equal) to the auxiliary verb in German. A light verb is a verb (of course), but its function is more like a particle which leads to the shift of structure within the sentence, e.g. focus, stress, and so on. For a typical transitive verb, like ‘吃’ (eat), both unmarked and ba-construction sentence express the same meaning:

(2a). 我吃了一个苹果。 I eat-PAR one-CLA apple.  – in the form of SVO.

(2b). 我把一个苹果吃了。 I ba one-CLA apple eat-PAR. – in the form of S-ba-O-V

(2c). *我一个苹果吃了。 *I an-CLA apple eat-PAR. – in the form of SOV. An asterisk indicates that the sentence is ungrammatical to native speakers like me.

Both (2a) and (2b) are grammatical and acceptable by a native speaker; (2c), a pure SOV order, sounds horrible unless uttered with a particular intonation pattern. We can see that the SOV order is possible only when ba is present.

Then we put the two together and go to the example 1 in the question, which is a combination of the double-object  and ba-constructions. For the ba-construction of (1), we can list a set for comparison:

(3a). 他给了我一本书。 (a replica of example (1).) He give-PAR me one-CLA book. – in the form of S-V-IO-DO.

(3b). 他把一本书给了我。 He ba one-CLA book give-PAR me. – in the form of S-ba-DO-V-IO.

(3c). #他给了一本书我。 # He give-PAR one-CLA book me.  – in the form of S-V-DO-IO. I use the hash here because in some Chinese dialects, e.g. Cantonese, the structure is perfectly acceptable, and I also see some of my Hong Kong friends using it in their variety of Standard Chinese; I would like to ignore it here because I’m talking about Standard Chinese, but the sentence is not that ‘standard’.

(3d). *他把我给了一本书。 * He ba me give-PAR one-CLA book. – in the form of S-ba-IO-V-DO.

For other possible structures, most of them are ungrammatical and unacceptable to native speakers; that includes all the structures in which V is at the very end of the sentence, including but not limited to S-IO-DO-V and S-ba-DO-IO-V. There should be at least one component after the main verb of the sentence for it to be grammatical; for Standard Mandarin Chinese, it can never be the case in a double-object construction that a sentence is a pure SOV sentence – which is rather convincing in showing that the structure of DO-V in both transitive and ditransitive sentences is a result of triggered movement, rather than a based-generated structure.

For a typical SOV language – unless certain extraposed structures are present (which is too complicated for non-syntacticians) – all objects should be in front of the main verb. At the same time, it is grammatical for an SOV language, like Japanese or German, to exchange the position between IO and DO – a process called ‘scrambling’. Scrambling, as a widely-present feature among OV languages, is impossible in Standard Chinese; this can be another piece of evidence, although the logic is not fully convincing. Sad story.

As for the remaining two examples, ‘从家里出去’ (from home-in go out) and ‘在家里睡觉’ (at home-in sleep), they belong to the problem of propositional phrases (PP) rather than that of objects. In Archaic Chinese, the position of a PP in relation to a main verb is rather flexible (or in Chomskyan terminology, a “free parameter”), but in Standard Mandarin Chinese, a PP attaching to a VP is more frequently a pre-verbal one. This is definitely interesting – but also more difficult; so if you think the following content may be beyond your grasp (which, actually, is the case for some of my classmates in our linguistics masters programme), just skip it and jump to the end.

Contemporary syntactic theories, especially the Chomskyan one, assume that any given sentence forms a tree structure, the large tree containing a series of smaller trees, corresponding to phrases. For every phrase, there is a head (the most important word), a complement providing the essential part of the rest of the phrase, and a specifier which is more or less like a modifier. For a VP including a transitive verb, the verb itself is the head, the object is its complement, while the adverbial (e.g. a PP) is its specifier.

In Standard Chinese, most of the time, the specifier is in front of the head, and that structure is less flexible. For instance, an NP (noun phrase) is in the form of AP-N, which is why we say ‘美丽的|姑娘’ (beautiful girl) rather than ‘姑娘|美丽的’ (girl beautiful); this is the same in the construction of the VP, so that we put the PP in front of the VP, and say ‘从家里出去’ rather than ‘出去从家里’, or ‘在晚上|看电视’ (in the evening watch TV) rather than ‘看电视|在晚上’ (watch TV in the evening).

Since we are talking about the specifier but not the complement when we discuss the PP-V construction in Chinese, that structure can never be used to argue for an SOV structure. The example ‘在晚上|看电视’ (in the evening watch TV, in the form of PP-V-O), on the contrary, obviously shows that Standard Chinese is a VO language.

I will not further extend my argument into an analysis of Greenberg’s Linguistic Universals, in which he suggests that a VO language always has head-complement order (while Chinese does not); that will be beyond the reach of 99% of my readers, and may even earn me a page in Linguistic Inquiry. I hope that it is clear enough for you to know why Standard Mandarin Chinese is an SVO language rather than an SOV one: basically, what you regard as an OV structure is not fully qualified. Next time try some more delicate examples and you are always welcome to ask me more questions.

Enjoy learning Chinese! All the best, Chris.

  You do not need to learn Chinese in order to be a syntactician. Try reading these:

Greenberg, Joseph H. Language universals: With special reference to feature hierarchies. Walter de Gruyter, 2005.

Haegeman, Liliane. Introduction to government and binding theory. 1991.

Li, Charles N., and Sandra A. Thompson. “An Explanation of Word Order Change SVO→SOV.” Foundations of Language, vol. 12, no. 2, 1974, pp. 201–214. www.jstor.org/stable/25000832.

Peyraube, Alain. “On word order in Archaic Chinese.” Cahiers de linguistique-Asie orientale 26.1 (1997): 3-20.

As promised last week, today’s Cam Lang Sci post brings you a report on ‘Language Detectives’, a public engagement event some folks here in Cambridge’s linguistics department put on on Saturday as part of the University’s Festival of Ideas.

  I’m happy to say that 4 talks, 14 activities, 40 volunteers, and in the realm of 200 visitors or so later (we lost count), we can call it a success. Many people – local and not so local, young and not so young – came and participated, trying their hand at something new or learning something interesting from linguistics research. We haven’t had the time to crunch the numbers from all the feedback forms yet, but the overall impression is that most people found it “enjoyable, interactive and fun”, as one guest put it.

  Particular highlights seem to have been: finding out about neural networks in a series of challenges that pitted the human mind against neural nets; cracking some patterns in Inuktitut orthography – and then writing your name in Inuktitut; puzzling over the stroop effect or how we recognise words in some classic psycholinguistic experiments; and discovering in lingquiztics that English is in fact not the language with the most native speakers (do you know which is?). The phonetics lab had panpipes made of straws to demonstrate how pitch varies, spectograms to ‘see’ you voice and an artificial larynx that lets you talk without making a sound. The maps of Cambridge showing visitors’ first and second languages soon filled up, showing a wealth of linguistic knowledge across the city: French, Greek, Mandarin, Polish, Afrikaans, Farsi, Vietnamese, Spanish, Serbian, Catalan, Cantonese, Czech, Filipino, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, and Dutch. And that’s just first languages! One person’s takeaway was “multilingual is good”!

  All in all an exciting – if exhausting – day, which opened up the breadth of linguistics research to a varied audience and, who knows, may have inspired some language detectives of tomorrow.

‘Who are they?’ I hear you cry. Well, I’ve talked a bit about public engagement in linguistics here before, and I’m going to revisit the theme today. As the title suggests, this is a two-parter, a before and after snapshot, if you like.

CC Rainer Zenz

This Saturday is a bit of a first for us here in Linguistics at Cambridge – well, at least a first in our post-grad student-living memory. As part of the University’s Festival of Ideas, we’ve planned a day of drop-in activities and talks about language science, for anyone who wants to come along. It’s “for all ages and tastes”, as our poster says. We’re rather excited that visitors are going to get a glimpse of pretty much every corner of linguistics that’s on offer here. Morphosyntax? Check. Psycholinguistics? Check. Multilingualism? Check. Language & technology? Check. And I could go on.

Our experience as linguists – and perhaps yours too – is that everyone is fascinated by language and languages. Yet, in UK at least, it’s not something we do much in our education system (yes, we learn languages – sort of – but we don’t think about language), and, unlike many other subject areas, there’s no one-stop-shop museum of language to satiate our curiosity. If you’re curious about language, you have to consult a book, or ask Google or a friendly linguist (not that there’s anything wrong with that). So, next Saturday, ‘Language Detectives’ is our little attempt to redress this imbalance in Cambridge, and give our local community the chance to explore this fundamental characteristic of human nature.

OK, enough of the grand talk. How are we actually planning to do that? Our activities and talks fall nicely, I think, into three types. Firstly, there are those that aim to get us thinking about our own experience of language and to come up with our own questions about communication. For example, in ‘Multilingual Cambridge’ we will build up two data maps of Cambridge over the day – of first languages or community languages spoken, and of second languages learned later in life – and guests can have a go at identifying photos of different written languages around the city. ‘Guess the accent’ asks you to identify different varieties of English and different foreign accents in English – but also explore your reactions to them. Do some sound more educated, more attractive or more trustworthy? There’s also a talk, ‘The end of English dialects?’, from some of the team who created the English Dialect App, which tries to guess the regional variety you speak and then lets you find out about differences across the UK (all while contributing to a worthy research project!). Secondly, there’s talks and activities that offer an insight into what it is us linguists do all day. The psycholinguistic experiments, morphosyntax puzzles and “Neurons vs Neural Networks” activity (a game where you’re pitted against a computational model of langauge) are examples, together with the appealingly-titled talk ‘“Speak friend and enter”: Tolkien as a gateway to Linguistics’. Then thirdly, there’s talks and activities that showcase language science research, sharing the findings from our linguistic investigations: on British Sign Language, Phonetics, Endangered Languages and Bilingualism. And I think my personal favourite for talk titles is ‘Rumours, Diseases and Drugs: Tackling Textual Data for Knowledge Discovery in Health’. So, that’s the plan. To find out how it all went, check back here next week for part II. And, to answer your question: Who are the Language Detectives? If you’re in Cambridge this Saturday, it could be you! Check out more details here!