Academic and disciplinary matters

A couple of interesting meta-academic things today:

1. No Facebook = Academic Value? An Inside Higher Ed blurb about a philosophy professor who offers his students extra credit for abstaining from “social and traditional media” for the whole semester. “Out of a class of around 35 students, only about 12 will try for the extra credit and by the end of the semester only between 4 and 6 are still “media abstinent.” Longer article here.

Interesting idea, and I’d love to see what kinds of reactions he gets from his students (one of them is interviewed in the article linked above). I want to know how it’s policed, of course–Is it just a matter of trust? Can you tell the difference between a journal entry written by a genuine abstainer and one written by a faker? Also, I don’t want to overstate things, but for some students, such a move–abstaining from ALL social AND traditional media??–would prove socially costly, and for all of my students, it would prove *academically* costly. Perhaps the prof makes exceptions for email, or academically-related media use, but at least at Michigan, we *expect* that students will actively participate in several kinds of social media use. Email at the very least, but in many people’s classes, also online discussion boards, media sharing, blogs, Twitter, and yes, Facebook. Using media is *part* of their grades. So it seems like this would affect students at many levels; those journal entries must be full of conflict and anguish!

2. New Journal of Experimental Linguistics, announced by Mark Liberman (its EIC). I think this is a *great* idea, though I confess that it sounds like the content will mostly be out of the realm of methodologies that I am knowledgeable about, except for Praat or R scripts. (All the better for something like this to exist, then, for people like me to learn a thing or two about other software and methods!)

The comments to Mark’s announcement are worth a look-see. As I recently mentioned, I’m reading The Linguistics Wars again (slowly), and my reaction to a few of these few comments makes me think on how the “wars” are continuing but with (slightly) different issues at core. Namely, are we a hard science, a humanities field, a social science, or what? A couple of the commenters suggest that partly because more and more experimental (read: computational?) work is happening in linguistics, it’s time linguistics was considered a hard science. Of course, in some ways this is what biolinguistics argues for as well. But there are plenty of people left in linguistics–both in practice and in training–who won’t find much of interest in a journal focused on experimental work or replication, and/or who aren’t interested in replacing the “social” (or “cognitive”?) with “hard” in the “______ science” designation. I for one am happy about this, because part of what is so exciting to me about linguistics is its straddling of different fields, methodologies, epistemologies, etc. In many ways this puts us at a disadvantage administratively, but from where I sit right now, the intellectual benefits are immense.

As part of my neverending quest to figure out if I’m a defective feminist for going to see and mostly enjoying the movie Brüno* (points to yes; points to no), I just watched Letterman’s “Top Ten Reasons to Go See the New Movie Brüno.” I don’t quite understand Reason 2:

Does this mean that he makes people like David Letterman uncomfortable, or that like David Letterman, he too makes people uncomfortable? In the first read Letterman’s allegedly homophobic and in the second he’s allegedly gay. Neither Brüno’s intonation nor Letterman’s response gives me any clues here about what the intended read is (and I’m not sure which read would be taken as more provocative/inflammatory, which is probably the intended one).

Also, why is the umlaut so inconsistently included in writing about Brüno, even in the movie’s own promotional materials (as seen on its website)? It’s clearly in the title of the film, but I’ve mostly seen it omitted when people write about it, either the character or the film.

*to be fair (or to further implicate myself), Brüno was also my favorite part of Da Ali G Show.

The other day Partner PC and I watched “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer,” a Cary Grant-Myrna Loy*-Shirley Temple vehicle that delivers on laughs and trades on some of the “hip” language of the day. A linguistic mystery emerged from this movie in the form of “What the hell is that word that Shirley Temple keeps saying??” She uses this word in the first two lines of the film, when her housekeeper tries to wake her up and she says that she feels _______. The word then recurs as a motif throughout the film. But we couldn’t understand what the word was, partly because of the terrible sound quality of the VHS/VCR, and partly — as I realize now — because of the acoustic similarities between labialized velar approximants and lateral ones. Linguistics to the rescue!

We kept hearing Shirley Temple say something that started with [skw], something that might be spelled “squawk(l)ish” or “squonkish” or maybe even just “skunkish” (which was the best approximation to a “real” word that we could come up with). Of course when I tried googling any of these I found nothing, because I didn’t know what I was looking for and it’s not the kind of movie that has tons of sites dedicated to deconstructing its every line. Finally today I struck gold and miraculously found the word. And the word is… SKLUNKLISH. Sklunklish. According to SlangSite, this word is:

sklunklish: general moodiness; dyspepsia of the spirit; non-specific disgust or aggravated boredom. Originally heard in the film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, uttered by Shirley Temple–apparently hepslang in upper middle class high schools in the late 1940s.
Example: Woke up feeling sklunklish, just stayed in bed all morning.

The word gets over 400 ghits, so people do use it (or perhaps, make reference to the movie through it) sometimes, and if we’d just been looking at the DVD instead of the VHS version, we’d have been able to find out easily what the word was, since it’s in the second chapter title (”Sklunklish in the A.M.”)! But we had no such niceties, and our ears failed us.

If I were a better phonetician (or a phonetician at all, really), I probably would’ve been able to guess that if I think I’m hearing [skw] but there’s no seeming what that that’s correct, it might be that I think I’m hearing [skw] when I’m really hearing [skl]. There’s not much difference in the formant properties of [l] and [w], though they should have some different coarticulatory impacts on the following vowel–and the fact that Shirley Temple seemed to me to be saying [skw?k??]***, with a mid-back rounded vowel, probably meant that I was more likely to hear a labial approximant. And so something about her vowels tricked me into perceiving something about her consonants. Cool!

Google needs to get to work on that feature that will turn a wrongly-spelled word into a close-sounding properly-spelled word, instead of just a word that’s close in spelling.

*can I just mention how much I loooooooove Myrna Loy?
***ok, what the hell is going on with IPA symbols in WP now? Can anyone help me figure this out? I can’t get them to come out as anything but question marks. Does anyone successfully use Charpal with recent WP versions???

I’m not sure how it happened given that I’ve been so negligent of my baby* this year, but PC was magically nominated nonetheless for one of the Top 100 Language Blogs of 2009, Language Professionals category, at Lexiophiles. This is a super great honor just to be nominated (true! it’s really true!) since most of the best linguablogs I know of are listed either there or at the Language Teaching or Language Learning categories (the blogs in Language Technology I know less about).

There’s absolutely no way I’ll come even moderately close to winning this–once Language Log and/or Fritinancy are involved, forget about it!–but if you have no great allegiance any other way I guess you could vote for me. Thanks! (And Thanks to whoever nominated me!)

*I have never referred to PC this way before and I’ll try never to do it again.

Sheesh, where does the summer go? To work and fun, that’s where. I’ve never had a summer before where I felt like I had so much to get done; I’ve been working fairly steadily for the last two months and don’t feel like I’ve made a dent in it! I think this is the summer where it smacks me in the face, what all the work is that successful academics actually hold down at once…I don’t even have any teaching-type responsibilities, and I still feel swamped with projects.

Anywho, so I am not sure whether that is a good explanation for why my posting has been so, so light lately, or whether the better explanation is that I simply feel that I have nothing good to say. Or perhaps that I feel all the other terrific linguabloggers are doing a perfectly fine job of saying everything themselves.

In the meantime, I’ve started re-reading The Linguistics Wars for fun, so I might post thoughts on that occasionally as I go. I’ve also started developing my dissertation project (finally!), and those thoughts will–let’s hope–be articulated clearly enough to share publicly at some soonish point. For now, let’s just say that it will involve experiments and syntax. Crazy, right?!?!

Also, would you like to see a pitch track from a news anchor reading a text from former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to his Chief of Staff Christine Beatty that says, “HELL YEAH”? Sure you do.

There is an entry in UMich’s library catalog, under search heading “Intonation,” that reads:

Yes, it’s the missing masterwork of Dwight Bolinger: Intonation and its pants. The Library is very lucky to hold such a treasure. When searching for said book on Google, it does return a Bolinger book as the first corrective result, though not the same book that the title is an aberration of (which is Intonation and its parts):

So, what do Intonation’s pants look like?

I saw this headline in the NYT today, as one of the “most-emailed” stories:

When I saw it on the teaser, I thought, “Oooh, ‘Corner Office’ conversation with someone who wants subjects, verbs, AND objects?? Is it an interview with Chomsky, or some other notable male linguistics prof?” But no. Of course it’s an interview with some truly business-y businessman, who just wants to hype up the value of “good communication skills”:

Q. What other questions do you ask [of job candidates]?

A. You want to know about their family. Where they grew up. What their parents did. Where they went to high school. What their avocations were. How many kids they had in their family. You know, what their whole background and history is.

I learned that from a C.E.O. I worked for. The C.E.O. wouldn’t really spend that much time on the résumé, but spent most of the time wanting to know everything about the person’s life, family, what they liked, where they liked to go on vacation, what their kids were like…

Q. What are you listening for as somebody describes their family, where they’re from, etc.?

A. You’re looking for a really strong set of values. You’re looking for a really good work ethic. Really good communication skills. More and more, the ability to speak well and write is important. You know, writing is not something that is taught as strongly as it should be in the educational curriculum. So you’re looking for communication skills…

It’s not just enough to be able to just do a nice PowerPoint presentation. You’ve got to have the ability to pick people. You’ve got to have the ability to communicate. When you find really capable people, it’s amazing how they proliferate capable people all through your organization. So that’s what you’re hunting for.

Q. And is there any change in the kind of qualities you’re looking for compared with 5, 10 years ago?

A. I think this communication point is getting more and more important. People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word. And when I say written word, I don’t mean PowerPoints. I don’t think PowerPoints help people think as clearly as they should because you don’t have to put a complete thought in place. You can just put a phrase with a bullet in front of it. And it doesn’t have a subject, a verb and an object, so you aren’t expressing complete thoughts.

And a lot of what we do in communication, when you write e-mail, you need to express yourself very clearly so people understand whether we’re going to L.A. today or we’re going to Boston today…

Do you hear that, people? Communication is more important NOW than EVER BEFORE. What got picked up for the headline, out of this *whole interview*, is the bit about “good communication” consisting of “complete thoughts” which means having “a subject, a verb and an object”–and that the existence of employees who can complete such thoughts by employing such a trio of parts-of-speech is apparently so rare that the demand for such is the most notable thing this CEO has to say. Language is STILL going to hell in a handbasket, everyone. So don’t start thinking it’s not. (Also, tell the NYT to use a subject, verb, and object when it wants to express thoughts!)

I finally started using twitter, kind of for-real this time. Find me at laurensq and follow along…

(someday I hope to have occasion to create a headline that reads, “Pro-drop in the bucket”)

I saw this lede in a most-emailed NYT article yesterday and was immediately captivated by its use of two null subject sentences in a row.

English is typically considered a non-null subject language (except in the case of very “informal” language), but I have heard some arguments to the contrary, though I can’t be bothered at the moment to identify them precisely for you… The first sentence, an imperative form, is unsurprisingly missing a subject, but the second sentence is of a less common form, especially in “formal” print media. At any rate, seeing this in the NYT of all places was startling and makes me think more change is afoot in the parameterization of (American) English w/r/t null subjects.

First of all, there was something new Real Housewives-related (go figure) last week that I wanted to post, which was of what I saw as a misunderstanding between Bethenny and Alex with regards to the word “online.” I tried to find video but was unsuccessful. Anyway, so Alex was telling Bethenny about how she met her husband, and the conversation went like this, I paraphrase:

Alex: I mean, you just can’t necessarily think you’re going to find love by LOOKING for it. I met Simon when I wasn’t expecting it; we just bumped into each other online when we were both just looking for one-night stands.
Bethenny: Really. And wait, so did you sleep together on your first date?
A: No, no, I mean…[I don't remember what she said next; I think they cut to her testimonial where she started crying because of how much she loves Simon]
B: Oh, so you but I mean, you were both just… out… looking for…
A: Yeah, I mean, we met, and then we started emailing each other a lot, and it was just amazing.
B: Ah! …[the rest of the conversation was really boring]

Do you see what happened here? I *think* Bethenny interpreted “online” to meet “in line,” because New Yorkers say “online” to mean “in queue.” So she thought they were like, waiting in line for club admission or something. But then when Alex started talking about *emails*, Bethenny realized she meant “online” like “on the internet,” which if Bethenny had stopped to remember that Alex is from Kansas, she might have interpreted appropriately in the first place (although actually, I could see Alex adopting “online” to mean “queued up” in order to fit in in New York…omg I really take these characters too seriously). So once Bethenny realized that Alex had met Simon ON THE INTERNET, her reaction to what Alex was telling her completely changed. You could see it in her face. It was crazy.

So, failed initial semantic ambiguity resolution. Though not sure how much of equal competitors the two meanings are, for Bethenny. I would have to know much more about her background and grammar for that.

Also, I will be at the Expanding Literacy Studies conference in Columbus this weekend–if you happen to be reading and will be there also, say hello! (Stranger things have happened. Last week one of the prospective grad students in the dept. met me, then immediately said “Are you Polyglot Conspiracy?” And I got real embarrassed.)